Saturday, December 8, 2007

Rum

In The Rum Diary, Kemp and the others are drinking almost constantly. The recurring presence of rum is significant because for the characters of this novel, rum is an escape from the troubles of life. One thing that Kemp accentuates over and over is the mixed nature of life in San Juan: the hope and beauty of the place at the beginning of a day can be replaced by crushing heat which destroys all joy by midday. As Kemp recalls of his days in San Juan, “Sometimes at dusk, when you were trying to relax and not think about the general stagnation, the Garbage God would gather a handful of those choked-off morning hopes and dangle them somewhere just out of reach…It was a maddening image, and the only way to whip it was to…banish the ghosts with rum,” (191). It is, then, not only the hopelessness of the place which drives the men to drink, but the fact that hope is always tantalizingly present, but it is tortuously wrenched away.

What are these unfulfilled hopes? Yeamon, in the beginning, hoped to live on an island paradise and to have a beautiful woman, Chenault, to control. However, Yeamon had that dream wrenched away when Chenault, rebelling against Yeamon’s dominating ways, ran away with another man after a wild party and never came back to him, eventually finding her way to Kemp who she apparently hopes to have a relationship with. For her part, Chenault wanted to live on an island paradise with a man and live an exciting, romantic life. This dream is crushed by Yeamon’s control. Kemp also had various hopes which were crushed. His hope for wealth in the booming Caribbean region was dashed by the reality of the immorality necessary to conduct business there. He had hoped to make money off the developers of Vieques, but ultimately realizes that his own hopes were in fact evil since they led him to destroy the island’s beauty. It is a key part of the death of these dreams that the characters not only fail to realize their hopes, but also that they realize the hopes themselves were immoral: Just as Kemp realized that his hopes were actually immoral, Yeamon ultimately realizes that his attempts to control Chenault were wrong. It is a process which breeds uncertainty; life’s goals on one day become despicable the next day. As Kemp remarks at the peak of his self-disgust over aligning himself with Lotterman (the newspaper owner) and Sanderson (a powerful economic and political figure), “‘I’m tired of being a punk—a human suckfish,’”(185). It is no wonder that these characters are so angry at the world and at themselves. It is even less of a wonder that they kill this pain with rum.

Next week I’m going to do a conclusion for The Rum Diary, then as I wait to get a copy of Hell’s Angels, I’ll give some background info on Hunter S. Thompson, then the week after that, I’ll get right into Hell’s Angels.

1 comment:

roledine L3 said...

Liked how you started with your view of the Rum and what it symbolizes in the novel. Thought out this blog you provided evidence to support how it individually affects the characters. My question for is what is the significance of power? You say that Yeamon was very controlling of Chenault. I think he was control because he had no control over his own life, so to escape he used Chenault. Kemp at the sees he grew from the cold and heartless to showing his emotional side. Thank you for letting me know about your future plans. I really enjoyed your views on The Rum Dairy, I look forward to reading more.