Bitter Ground Analysis

Instances of Displacement

In Neil Gaiman’s “Bitter Grounds”

“In every way that counted, I was dead,” begins the narrator-protagonist of Neil Gaiman’s “Bitter Grounds”, hinting at the theme of a profound shift in identity that will soon be explained. Indeed the reader will soon be introduced to a subtle slip from one reality into another through the eyes of a man faced with loss, love and his own identity. The elements of fantasy heighten the sense of displacement that accompanies the narrator from his initial purposelessness and self-exile, through the shaping of a new identity and search for a new purpose to his final act of abandon in the end. The idea of displacement, as evidenced by the very volume that features the story discussed

However, that is of little import as his identity is shaped over the course of the four chapters of the story after he detaches himself of his old persona – he leaves his home, throws away his phone and retrieves as much of his money as possible and wonders if someone else would slip into his old life as easily as he had slipped out of it. As Mark Currie mentions in his Postmodern narrative theory, “identity is relational, […] it is not found within a person but that it inheres in the relations between a person and others” (17). Although we only get to see the events through the eyes of the unnamed narrator, he only begins to crystallize as a character once he begins interacting with others – he is the good Samaritan to the stranded Professor, giving him a lift when he needs to get back to his car and retrieves his wallet from the hotel, after the Professor vanishes, he unconsciously picks up his identity and gradually returns to life, plagued only by the fear of being uncovered as an impostor, while still feeling comfortable enough in his new identity in the company of strangers, playing along with the new game he has gotten himself into. Currie states that the way in which the author can control the sympathy and antipathy felt for characters is in direct relation to the distance from and

Aside from the snippets of radio transition, the real Jackson Anderton invokes urban myths to describe the narrator, “A Phantom Hitchhiker story. After I get to my destination, I’ll describe you to a friend, and they’ll tell me you died ten years ago, and still go round giving people rides.” Only, it is Anderton himself that vanishes, leaving the narrator to replace himself into his life. Anderton’s paper on Haitian coffee girls, which he was going to present at the conference he was heading to, proves to be another piece in the larger, reflexive puzzle of the story – not only does it prove true in the end, but the fragments quoted from Zora Neale Hurston’s work also apply to the narrator’s situation “This was the way Zombies are spoken of: They are the bodies without souls. The living dead. Once they were dead, and after that they were called back to life again.’(qtd in “Bitter Grounds”) The narrator’s usurpation of Anderton is what initially brings him back to life but, like the zombies in the Professor’s paper, he becomes controlled by the power that had reanimated him, eventually dying