Week 5 - "Butter Cow"

One aspect of this story, aside from the purposeful vagueness of the identity or point of view of the narrator, which really captured me was the rhythm that Martone created through repetition, both through diction and subject matter. This created an almost droning effect as I read it to myself. The repetitious description of the cows, their behavior and the generations of cows that came before them also helped encapsulate the droning monotony of a landscape that rolled on and on and on, flat in every direction. The way he describes the people at the fair roaming around, eating, chewing, consuming thoughtlessly and endlessly directly mimics the cows, making the people feel like cattle in our proverbial eyes. The whole piece has this unsettling way of making everything blend together – fields and roads, cattle and people – melting into Dali-esque dreamscape. It becomes even more surreal as it draws to a close, the repetition of words growing closer together until sentences are hardly coherent, and leaving, at least to me, a yawning, empty space which soon after floods with confusion. This piece left me with the kind of frustration I get when not only I do not understand, but feel as though I was never meant to understand in the first place.