The narrators of both these stories are, quite bluntly, complete idiots. It is surprising that both of them admit to it at the end of each story. We’ve read in Ottessa’s previous stories of the idiocy of several of her characters, but none of them ever admitted to it. The two male characters in these stories take a different path, hence the reason they are telling us.
Ottessa Moshfegh
While these two characters are of different ages—eighteen and thirty-three—during the events of the stories, they share several character traits, one of them being a ridiculous imagination. They both live for the flimsy, false images inside their heads. The first narrator moves to Los Angeles in hopes of being a successful actor, not out of any real desire to be an actor, but because he is enamored of the lifestyle; he admits to us he can’t act. He says “I didn’t particularly like movies. It seemed like hard work to act in something that went on for so long. I thought I could move to Hollywood and get a role on a show like Eight Is Enough as the cool older brother. And later I could be like Starsky on Starsky and Hutch.” He is clearly overlooking the fact that being on a television show requires far more time than a movie. He tells us later that “I was bold. I was courageous. I was exceptional. I had big dreams…One day I’d be escorted through the streets in a motorcade, and the entire world would know my name.” And yet, to be famous and rich are not the reasons why he is pursuing this path. He wants to break the cycle in his family and the small-town life in which he had been raised. “My mother had no idea what real ambition was,” he says. “Her father was a janitor. Her father’s father had been a farmer. Her mother’s father had been a pastor at the prison. I would be the first in a succession of losers to make something of myself.” He has no real ambition himself; he simply wants to be first male in his family to have something other than a small-town, menial job. His move to Los Angeles is based on nothing more than a thought. In the end he tells us that “each night before I fell asleep, [Mrs. Honigbaum] recited some prayers in Hebrew and put her hands on my face and shoulders. Whatever spells she cast, they didn’t work. Neither of us was very surprised.” We can infer from these last sentences that he never made it big in Los Angeles and he returned home to Utah. He most likely works in the prison and is married to one of the girls from his high school, and it is from this perspective that he is telling the story.
The second narrator’s stupidity propels us along right from the opening paragraph. He meets a woman in a furniture store and “her face was pinched, as though she’d just smelled someone farting. It was that look of revulsion that awoke something in me. She made me want to be a better man.” He later tells us that “I had to marry her. If I couldn’t, I would kill myself.” He is no longer interested in any other woman, nor is he affected by them. He only wants Britt, a woman who couldn’t be less interested in him and sees him as a client. His fabrication of wanting an ottoman refurbished only serves to highlight his idiocy. “I understood that I’d be deceiving Britt Wendt by claiming ownership of this ottoman,” he says, “but I reasoned that as soon as she fell in love with me—perhaps she already had—the existence of the furniture or lofts, any trite reality, would become laughably irrelevant.” He imagines their life together of eating, drinking, and sex. When she does reply to his previous email with her own grammatically incorrect one, he rushes off to buy the ottoman from a teenage boy. He gives up, for the most part, all of his clothes and all of his money for this ratty piece of furniture. And because in his haste he left his floor heater on, he burns down the apartment complex. The last sentence is when he admits his stupidity: “I didn’t start the fire,’ I said, like the dumb man I’d become. ‘This is an act of God.” The narrator tells us this story years later—the time progression is unknown. He understands that he was a broke, drunk, horny man who was only attracted to Britt for the imagined amazing sex. And yet there are questions that need to be answered: Why was a look of revulsion what attracted him to Britt? Why was he so lonely? Why did he want to be “murdered” by either Britt or the woman from Iga, the Polish bar? Given our understanding of the nature of Ottessa’s characters, this narrator doesn’t have the answers.