The in-between place that Lazarus seems to reside in is exemplified in the how he is alive to his mother while he is physically dead. Brik imagines that while the letter carrying the news of Lazarus’ death traveled across the ocean “Lazarus was still alive for her...then she got the letter from Olga and read it and reread it...thinking up misunderstandings that could be undone so he could be restored to life” (Lazarus 74). In this imagining, Lazarus is both alive and dead, while maintaining the possibility of resurrection. Here, he is dead to those who reside in the U.S. while he is alive to those who are home. The story is playing with focalization, twisting from one character and what they know to the next, jumping from country to country
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Over and over again, Brik imagines different scenarios about Lazarus that become more real to him that the actual man who died in 1908. He begins depictions of Lazarus’ life with “I imagined Lazarus” (Lazarus 207). These are not certainties, and range from all the encounters that Lazarus might have had with eggs to the journey he might have had fleeing eastern Europe. All of these things are creations of Brik, the person he sets out to “preserve forever, like a fly in resin” is not the human being, but instead his own creation (Lazarus 13). He bookends ideas he has about Lazarus with “Here was how I imagined it,” both acknowledging the limitations of his mind while also allowing the reader to choose to take it as fact (Lazarus 127). Since The Lazarus Project is a book about a book being written, Brik’s own imaginings of the book he will write becomes twisted and intertwined with the real, …show more content…
The author mentions traveling around the same area that Brik does, though many years before, with a photographer friend, whose photos take up the pages in between the chapters—where the reader would imagine Rora’s photos belong. Hemon checks a lot of the same boxes that Brik does: they both live in Chicago, maintained newspaper related careers, both identify as Bosnian-Americans, he even states that they shared the same nightmare of George W. Bush attacking them. And yet, Hemon maintains that these works are not autobiographical, that they are instead, that “they are antibiographical, they are the antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me” (New Yorker). He conceives of them as stories of imagined possibilities, but like how Brik imagines all the things that could have happened to Lazarus, all the things that could have happened to him. Like, what if he was, indeed, “a survivor who resurrected in America?’ (Lazarus 43) What if Brik had managed to shed the skin of his past life and become a different man, separate from his past in a way that he cannot imagine—free, no longer stuck wandering the woods that he had been trapped in so long ago—and how does this relate to how Hemon feels about his own past, his own possible futures, and what it means for him to write a character like Brik, who creates his own version of this, when he dreams up a Lazarus that lived all the
Over and over again, Brik imagines different scenarios about Lazarus that become more real to him that the actual man who died in 1908. He begins depictions of Lazarus’ life with “I imagined Lazarus” (Lazarus 207). These are not certainties, and range from all the encounters that Lazarus might have had with eggs to the journey he might have had fleeing eastern Europe. All of these things are creations of Brik, the person he sets out to “preserve forever, like a fly in resin” is not the human being, but instead his own creation (Lazarus 13). He bookends ideas he has about Lazarus with “Here was how I imagined it,” both acknowledging the limitations of his mind while also allowing the reader to choose to take it as fact (Lazarus 127). Since The Lazarus Project is a book about a book being written, Brik’s own imaginings of the book he will write becomes twisted and intertwined with the real, …show more content…
The author mentions traveling around the same area that Brik does, though many years before, with a photographer friend, whose photos take up the pages in between the chapters—where the reader would imagine Rora’s photos belong. Hemon checks a lot of the same boxes that Brik does: they both live in Chicago, maintained newspaper related careers, both identify as Bosnian-Americans, he even states that they shared the same nightmare of George W. Bush attacking them. And yet, Hemon maintains that these works are not autobiographical, that they are instead, that “they are antibiographical, they are the antimatter to the matter of my life. They contain what did not happen to me” (New Yorker). He conceives of them as stories of imagined possibilities, but like how Brik imagines all the things that could have happened to Lazarus, all the things that could have happened to him. Like, what if he was, indeed, “a survivor who resurrected in America?’ (Lazarus 43) What if Brik had managed to shed the skin of his past life and become a different man, separate from his past in a way that he cannot imagine—free, no longer stuck wandering the woods that he had been trapped in so long ago—and how does this relate to how Hemon feels about his own past, his own possible futures, and what it means for him to write a character like Brik, who creates his own version of this, when he dreams up a Lazarus that lived all the