Keep It Jazzy

Coming through Slaughter by Michael Ondaatje has a very unique style. The whole story is about this guy who is awesome playing jazz and whose whole life revolves around jazz. Incredibly, the structure and form of the book correctly mirrors the style in which jazz is played.

Ondaatje starts writing a story that we might think will continue that way for the rest of the book, but suddenly, he changes into another story in a completely different chronological order for about 2 pages, then starts telling yet another story and finally coming back to the original one. He continues to do this, and inserting new and seemingly unrelated stories all the time.

Just like in jazz, in the moment of reading the book you might not understand why Ondaatje decides to write each thing the way he did, or where a piece came from, but later when you think about it everything makes sense and leaves the reader with the feelings that the author wanted them to feel.

Coming through Slaughter doesn't have a specific structure, which allows the reader to never know what Ondaatje will be talking about in each page. There is no way of predicting what will come next. The same thing happens when you are listening to jazz music. There are ups and downs and even the tone of the book changes all the time. There are with anecdotes, some pieces of conversations, poems, songs, and images given for the reader to get the whole picture, but in a very choppy way. The structure of the book can also be seen as a representation of Buddy Bolden's personality, and his bipolar way of being and later schizophrenia.

Ondaatje's book is structured in a very fragmented way, which may lead the reader to believe temporarily that the vignettes used are unrelated to each other. That, however, is not the case. There are many small vignettes swimming in a pool of stories, but they all make part of Buddy's life story and help explain why he is who he is.

All the vignettes are designated to achieve the same goal: present Buddy to the readers in a very unique way. It uses the personal experiences and knowledge of Bellocq, Webb, Picket, Nora, the Louisiana Hospital, etc. to give a very unbiased and subjective idea of who Buddy Bolden was. It is without a doubt the best biography of jazz player Buddy Bolden that anyone has written yet.