Sound And Silence Brockmeier Analysis

In expertly writing his story centered around sound and silence, Brockmeier makes a statement of the issue of noise and it’s effects on the people who hear it by continuously describing them throughout the story. A hundred years ago, there didn’t exist the sounds that exist today; maybe one could stop and hear a bird whistle in a lightly rustling breeze while crunching on leaves as they would go for a walk. Now, especially in heavily urbanized areas, it is possible to hear all sorts of planes, trains, automobiles, rings and dings and all sorts of other things, and this was certainly the case in the beginning of the story when the very sounds themselves are described as “ [a] boom”, “scraping”, and “cutting through the air”, all of which are

One of these moments occurs during the transition of time in Section 9 of the story. At this point in time, a desire for silence was apparent and deep in the hearts of men and women of the city, so much so that they wanted more of it and that it could “last forever”. (Brockmeier 420) Then, when the idea came to make more silence, something that the people wanted, everyone hopped on board with that idea and it took off “with an astonishing tenacity”, soon coming to the point where laws were made to ban certain sounds. (Brockmeier 420-421) Jumping from here to Section 21, it can be clearly seen that the city people desired to hear sound again and, in Section 23, “the city council drafted a measure to abolish the silence initiative” and, key thing to notice here, is that is passed by “common consent”. (Brockmeier 426) There is a similarity that can be made with these two turning moments in the story; both times, the society wanted something, they agreed to pass legislation to get that something, and legislation did pass and reflected what the society wanted. This is the point Brockmeier is trying to make; law doesn’t describe or define a society, but rather reflects it. The people wanted silence, and soon laws reflected that; the people then wanted silence and soon, the laws reflected that as

Rather than simply creating a new world from scratch, Brockmeier retains elements of who we, as humans, really are like in order to make the story more understandable, relatable, and even a bit more realistic (which is a very interesting and almost bold thing to do in a fiction story). In an interview not too long ago, Brockmeier mentioned how part of what he “hungers for” as a reader is seeing the “beauty of existence” and how he wants to experience everything on the written page by encountering a world “not how we believe it to be”. (Brockmeier) This being said, Brockmeier appears to write in “The Year of Silence” about humanity, not how we believe it to be, but how it actually is and what we are actually like. For instance, take the part in Section 2 where people try to explain the silence away and in Section 16 where a physicist makes up the “skipping-rock model” to explain the pattern of the silence; both of these incidents, among others, accurately portray human rationality and thinking, in which humans try to explain away something, especially if it is something we don’t know too much about or is a mystery (Brockmeier 418, 423) The city people didn’t know the who, what, why about the silence, and their rational thoughts conflicted with this, leaving them uncertain on what to feel and