Bluets

          The unusual style of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets allows the prose to accomplish a lot style- and content-wise which a more hackneyed narrative style would not.  By writing the story as a series of entries, it enables the reader to maintain interest.  Instead of reading a long narrative chain of events, the action is broken up into a variety of sequences.  It provides the reader with time to reflect between sections, a break which a normal story would not provide.  These breaks are equally as thought provoking as the stories themselves are.  They are all very dramatic, poetic, and linked by Nelson’s love for the color blue.

79. For just because one loves blue does not mean that one wishes to spend one’s life in a world made of it. ‘Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only which lies in its focus.’ wrote Emerson. To find oneself trapped in any one bead, no matter what its hue, can be deadly.

This passage really highlights the creative nature of Nelson’s prose.  By including a quote from Emerson, the author pays homage to a brilliant poet and enables the reader to appreciate the poetic nature of Bluets.  Her sentences are both poetic and profound, and they really make the reader contemplate and meditate on the nature of the passage.  

The passage also echoes the narrative style of the book; Bluets is a compilation of a series of stories which can stand alone, but when combined they effectively illustrate her life story, just like the string of beads analogy.  Anyone’s life story is a series of different small stories strung together to make up a bigger story, and hers is no exception to this.  The form of the stories is broken up and almost stream of consciousness, which shows how she lives her life moment by moment.

Furthermore, blue is the archetypal color to demonstrate sadness and loneliness, two themes which pervade Bluets.  They are not only present in her symbolism and thematic elements, but in the way she writes and what she writes.  In number 215, Nelson describes how “it often happens that we treat pain as if it were the only real thing, or at least the most real thing when it comes round, everything before it, around it, and, perhaps, in front of it, tends to seem fleeting, delusional” (87).  This passage clearly exemplifies how much her emotional pain influences what she writes and the way she views the world.  The dramatic style of Bluets shows how she lives her life passionately, which is also conveyed through the content of the stories.