In Class Post(superscript 1)

¹A blog post about footnotes should be written in a footnote.²

²Or a few footnotes.³

³I decided to write this post differently. In addition to the smartass opening, I wrote this post in a more segmented fashion, because I feel the footnote containing Johnny’s story (pages 296-301) relates to many things in addition to the section it succeeds.

For starters, it does refer back vaguely to the section ahead of it (pages 292-296, mostly blank space, in which the staircase expands and leaves Navidson impossibly far down). The end of that section is:

“Navidson makes a desperate grab for the only remaining thread connecting him to home, but he is too late. About ten feet above the last banister [the rope snaps]^…

^…Time has accelerated and I’ve done nothing to mark its passage.” (p295-296)

There is a key juxtaposition here between the staircase stretching, becoming longer and Johnny’s few weeks becoming a day, suddenly shrinking. This is an example of how the footnotes aren’t necessarily connected by being similar—sometimes they are connected in that they are opposite. However, these lines are not only spatially connected. There is a similar element of denial—Johnny shows up at work like nothing’s happened, in denial as to how quickly he’s lost the time just like the grieving group in the house have trouble accepting Navidson is gone.

Then there’s the element of survivalism present. This footnote almost looks ahead to the succeeding passage where Navidson makes a long trek home when Johnny writes, “Right now the only thing that keeps me going is some misunderstood desire to finish The Navidson Record.” (p297) He fights on through the difficulties of his life just to finish the book, like Navidson will find supplies and climb the stairs despite having no real hope of making it back. This is also related in that similar to Navidson not knowing if he’ll even make it home, Johnny has no idea if he even has anything to learn about himself from finishing Zampano’s book, or if “…when the answers arrive the questions are already lost.” (p297)

Lastly, the story he tells (fabricates?) about The Atrocity sinking relates back to his own story of the boat that sunk in Alaska when he worked there, as well as the growl in the house. The line I’m referring to is: “…a grinding relentless roar, which like a growl in fact, overwhelms the pumps…” (p297) He describes a similar roar in the Alaska story, as well as details about the two incidents being similar (fire on board, water rushing in from everywhere). There is certainly a resonation between the two events in his mind (if The Atrocity even counts as an event). The word growl also relates it to the house, perhaps on a level of things tearing apart—ships tearing apart in his mind, like the house tearing itself to stretch and grind into different shapes and sizes. I for one do hold the belief that there is no creature in the depths of the house, there is only the sound of the house moving and changing, grinding on itself. So far I have seen no indication other than that sound that there is something living in it, and the idea of the house moving against itself to create a resonating growl sounds plausible.

Many of the other footnotes which contain Johnny stories are this same way—they relate to the section they succeed on a very broad vague level, and they also tie back to one another and ultimately to Zampano and how he discovered the book. Johnny always writes about how reading this is affecting his life, in one form or another.

Chelsea