My notes in the first section of Charles Chesnutt’s Deep Sleeper are a pastiche of opinions expressed by cultural anthropologists and Russian formalists. I find more of my Chesnutt notes but this time I’d Xeroxed an entire passage with only a couple notes. I distinguish between what is a footnote and what is a remark. A good footnote is clear about what question it answers. My remarks, on the other hand, contemplate open-endedly. 

In Chesnutt’s story, at 4 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon in July, the air is hot and sultry but there is a light breeze and the only sound is the hum of a bumblebee. This indicates to the reader that the story is beginning because the stillness of the scene tells us something is about to happen. As readers, we know how the conventions of the fictional world operate and we view the I as the center point. 

All is going well until Kilroy’s voice comes from the watermelon patch. Earl and Cornbread are notorious for their graffiti in the metropolis and they are uncatchable until they get on the 747 in the Philadelphia International Airport. You recall your reflection in the funhouse mirror and for a brief moment you wonder if your reflection is you. The person pauses reading the book and tells someone off for looking through their journal and the conversation has plenty of space for annotations. 

A professor of literature at Wyoming is teaching two courses. In one class, he has a husband and, in the other, he has that man’s wife. They are both redheads. The male wants to become a novelist and the woman is in his Afro-American literature class where she reads Charlie W. Chesnutt. The professor comes to learn that the couple are both diary keepers which he finds charming. Soon, the professor will travel to a neighboring Colorado university to sit on a panel about Surfiction and so he assembles a stack of novels from the latest and most-hip bibliographies he could find to prepare. He discovers that you can stack ten of them in the space of two traditionally-sized novels and that most of the authors’ names start with “B.” He decides he needs to see the redhead couples’ diaries. The girl reads his diary and then falls out of love with him and retreats to her own diary. When she meets with the professor, they analyze Deep Sleeper but the meeting ends in tears as she reads from either her husband’s or her diary. This plot intentionally breaks down and the characters disintegrate and the stable narrative voice is displaced by hundreds of screaming madmen in literary history, and so it ends.