A shallow interpretation: "To Buffalo Eastward" by Gabriel Bump, Best American Short Stories 2021

I'm putting a disclaimer up front: I've only read The Great Gatsby once, in high school. I've also only read Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man once, in college. I've never read Joyce's Ulysses, and from all I know of it, I never intend to. The Cliff's notes seem enough. 

That rather shabby background might seem to put me in a poor position to produce a credible reading of Gabriel Bump's short story "To Buffalo Eastward," since allusions to those three novels play such a central role in the narrative. However, I'm going to suggest that my half-assed familiarity with these three novels makes me, in fact, the perfect reader of this story.

That's because the narrative is full of characters who perform half-assed readings: of songs, of books, but mostly of people. The unnamed central character (Karen! The drinking game begins with the first story!) known only as "Invisible Man," is on their* way from northern Michigan to somewhere east of Buffalo. They're headed there after a disappointment in love. Not really a breakup, more a hoped-for, impossible dream that never fully materialized. Invisible Man was into a girl who turned out to be more interested in marrying a guy she'd been seeing. 

A journey to a destination is often the stuff of epics (like the original Ulysses), but in this case, it's something of an anti-epic. The great American travel adventure has always been about an adventure west, into the wild. Invisible Man, though, is headed back east, back past that great symbol of wild American adventure, the buffalo. IM's journey is much like their narrative--full of digressions and meanderings. They confess about their indirect story telling: "I have problems telling stories. I get on one track and backflip to another, running in the opposite direction." 

As the story slowly unfolds, IM stops at bookstores on the road and runs into a few people. The most notable of these people are the three IM meets near Cleveland, who all give names made up on the spot taken from novels. There's Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, two women who name themselves for Great Gatsby characters, and then there's a carpenter/bookstore owner/landlord who calls himself Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's esquire. (Okay, I have read Quixote with a fair amount of care, and more than once, and in Spanish, but I don't think you really need to know more than most people know about it for this story.) 

Sancho and Invisible Man are having a drink in a bar while watching a baseball game. IM narrates some of the details of the game, but manages to get the name of one of the teams wrong, calling the Twins "Minneapolis" instead of "Minnesota." When the girls enter the bar, they ask what Sancho is reading, and are told it's Joyce. "Dubliners!" one of them shouts. "Finnegan's Wake!" shouts the other. They obviously have about an English 101 knowledge of Joyce. They probably have only read the books that were assigned to them in school, which is why they give themselves names from The Great Gatsby. They have a similar reaction to Invisible Man's name. "The lights!" one of the Great Gatsby girls yells, which is about all I can remember of that novel I read more than twenty years ago. 

The Great Gatsby girls are only capable of the most cursory understandings of the texts that lurk at the back of the story. Daisy Buchanan calls herself "alone and boring," meaning the character in the book she is named for is alone and boring. Her companion complains that this is "a shallow interpretation," but all the characters are interpreting shallowly. They listen to songs on the radio, but without trying to understand what they mean: "We tried to guess the words to songs we hadn't heard before, wouldn't hear again." They go through long periods of silence because "there was nothing to know." When they pile into Invisible Man's car, they can see IM's "life laid bare for them to inspect and handle" in all the books, clothes, and trash in the car, but instead of trying to learn from what's there, they throw it into the trunk with the rest of the mess. 

Everyone ends up going to an office building Sancho allegedly owns, where they pass several more people they catch only glimpses of. The entire world continually presents them with texts they are only reading the covers of. They get high off pills Sancho gives them. They spend hours talking about relationships that have gone bad, partly through the inability to truly understand the people in their lives. This talking, though, does not lead to real connection: "We spent hours like that: talking and not understanding one another's eyes."  

It's not that the characters do not desire something deeper. They are briefly attracted to "charts and graphs and memos" they find in the office building, because through them they "felt connected to important happenings." While high, Jordan Baker dreams of going to the deepest parts of the ocean, archetypal symbol of the unconscious. She imagines a submarine, but Invisible Man thinks that "there wasn't a submarine." Even if there is really a submarine, a passageway to deep understanding, it would be beyond Jordan's ability to comprehend: "It's all scientific, these things I don't understand." 

In the end, although Daisy Buchanan has called for "an adventure," Invisible Man is the only one able to keep moving on with their journey. Why? What makes IM different? Perhaps it's IM's ability to read others a little more deeply. When Invisible Man first meets Daisy and Jordan, Invisible Man struggles "to find a difference between" the girls, but soon finds it possible to distinguish "unique lines and blemishes" between the two. 

Maybe even the mistake with the baseball team was meaningful. The team is the Minnesota Twins. It's an unusual name; most teams are named for cities, rather than states, with relatively few exceptions. And "twins," of course, are the one thing most people can't tell apart without getting to know both people really well. Perhaps the "mistake" of putting the Twins in a more specific location than just Minnesota is Invisible Man's meandering mind finding meaning, putting it in the more specific spot with more concrete meaning. IM has taken something indistinguishable and generic to most people and interpreted it on a deeper level, giving it identity it didn't have. Perhaps this tendency will eventually allow IM to give themselves identity others find it difficult to see. Not all minds that wander are lost, in this case. Invisible Man calls them "Minneapolis" because she is paying attention and wants to see the team's "unique lines." 

IM claims to have vague features that leave others confused about their ethnicity, and of course there is the issue of whether IM is male, female, or something else. IM needs a close reading to be understood. IM shows throughout the text that they have this capacity for close reading, which means that even if nobody else understands them, they will eventually succeed at understanding themselves.  

IM pays attention to details, which helps to orient her in the vastness of space. One advantage IM seems to have compared to Jordan and Daisy is that IM doesn't get swallowed up in the ocean, the thing too deep to comprehend. Instead, IM has many memories of lakes. IM's happiest memory of their recent unrequited love happened on a lake. Their first time getting high was on an island in a lake. When that happened, IM and their friends "all linked arms and looked out a broken window onto our lakes. The late-night stillness heightened our experience, as if the water was one big mirror that could swallow our souls, the ghosts inside us." . 

Daisy's ocean is an abyss that confounds her. Invisible Man's lake is a mirror that helps them see themselves. It would be easy to write off the drug hallucinations as lazy writing, as I saw someone do in one amateur review online, but it's hard to deny that these kinds of drug trips are journeys into the sub-conscious and can be disorienting in a troubling way. That journey into the mind parallels the physical journey Invisible Man is making. Drug trips are risky writing, but I believe this particular trip is consistent with the theme of the story. 

The concluding scene shows that one of the girls has scrawled "Invisible Man, make it where you're going" on IM's car window, and I believe they are going to make it. They're going to make it because their ability to distinguish, to read deeply enough to understand others and their surroundings, will keep them oriented. Even the wandering storytelling is a means of self-preservation for Invisible Man, something that keeps them moving on a journey instead of stopping, that keeps them swimming instead of sinking. 

At least, that's how it seems to me without doing any real research, which I think is how the story is asking to be read. 

*I originally read the protagonist as a woman, but Karen Carlson and Rhiannon Morgan-Jones made a good argument for the central character maybe not being a woman. I read Invisible Man as a woman because of the "take this wrench so those boys don't take advantage" passage, but Karen and Rhainnon are probably right that there are other facts in the story that suggest otherwise and that the ambiguity is probably a feature, rather than a bug. I've gone with "they/their" in this post, although I have to confess it made it difficult to write in places, because I ended up with overlapping "they/their" pairs--one for Invisible Man and one for the whole group. For Karen Carlson's take on this story, have a look here. For Rhainnon's, see here.