Juice

When I first started reading this book I thought I understood what was going on. I thought it was about this person that was left in his society by himself. He left his town and when he returned the town was deserted, as stated on page 13 "I am not concerned about how the townspeople will express themselves upon their return; they could come in happiness or in extreme anger and it would not bother me. The point is that they return." As I kept reading throughout the story the theme changed. Now I started thinking that maybe the beginning was the present of the main characters life, and throughout the book he was reminiscing of past experiences he had had with people. He was so set on the townspeople returning and on page 19 he states, "In the appearance of any species there is an element of its disappearance and within its disappearance a particle of return." So while everything disappeared, he also said that many of the plants and all the fruit has disappeared, there is always that hope of them returning.

There are certain parts in this book that reminded me of other things that I have either read for the class already, or a movie that I've seen before. One line is on page 9 and its says, "The town took a child from every family, plus each child's third eldest cousin, and started to call us a gang." In the movie 300, which is all about Sparta and the wars they were in, in the beginning it shows that any couple who had a baby boy would have to give him up for training when he was very small. If the child was weak or diseased he was thrown off a cliff to face his death. The others were turned into fearless warriors to help protect the civilization. The line from the book reminded me of the movie. Another line from this book reminded me of the short story we had to read for class, Internal. "You get to a point in isolation where you have to grab the reins; you can't let the silence get to you" (Page 15). The point in the Internal when the interns are starting to lose their mental state because of being in silence for so long. This line in the story reminded me of that because it says that you can't let the silence get to you. The main character is alone in his society and still finds ways to keep himself occupied somehow. If he didn't keep himself occupied he would have ended up "going nuts" to say just like the interns in the Internal.

Overall, this story just confused me. It jumped around a lot and did not hold a constant theme all throughout. At one point he is by himself in his society, another part towards the end he is with his neighbors and one of the neighbors goes missing and nobody can find her. Some point during the story he is on a train, just people watching. Other points hes talking about his lovers. I had to closely take mental notes of where the character was during the part that I was reading at any given moment, because the setting changed so much and so rapidly. I'm very confused as to if he was actually alone or if others were around him, and one final thought, how did Juice actually play a part in this? Since the title is Juice, I figured it would've had a greater effect on the story, but it only shows up a couple times explaining how much he loved juice at one point, and at other points he just couldn't bring himself to drink more juice. What is it about the juice?!