Poetic Imagery In Garth Greenwell's Mitko

Mitko by Garth Greenwell has a wonderful verbal energy with beautiful yet gritty poetic imagery. It explores the nameless protagonist's desire and obsession. The story branches from tragedy and romance forcing the main character to have a bit of tormented lust for Motko.

The speaker was caught between his longing and lust for a detached character that was hard to read as much has the protagonist could understand from Mitko’s fragmented speeches. Often the main character would find himself struggling from Mitko’s aloofness at times towards him and stated on page 63,"I fell back from him then, I lay next to him thinking, as I had cause to think before, of how helpless desire is outside its little theater of heat, how ridiculous it becomes the

The main character makes himself vulnerable and bare while still 'trying to keep his pride' and falsehood of of what he is wanting. Despite his feelings toward “bareness” that causes him to feel like it is staged, this ‘bareness’ stays with narrator throughout the novel as he continues to be the outsider. Even in his words he had to "speak with a kind of bareness, a lack of strategy or recourse" (Greenwell 73). Mitko is developed to the speaker’s narrative. The reader learns about his exploitation, his wants, and his history of illness such as his liver disorder (most likely caused by excessive drinking.) Mitko has a bit of a uncertain nature to him and character that is full of contradictions. The narrator makes note of this, “contradictions that, as they alternate and repeat and thus form patterns and reliances, as much as anything else make up the self” (Greenwell 25). The plot of the story follows these contradictions such as the the speaker's self contradictions of trying to convince himself of his friendship with a man that is only around if he is getting paid. Mitcko was prosperous and is now homeless, and as the narrator put it, “How can we account for them, time and chance that together strip us of our promise, making of our lives almost always less than we imagined or was imagined for us, not maliciously or with any other intent, but simply because the measure of the world's