Critical Response to Christian Fazio’s “Pigeons”

One of the things I have always liked about Chris’ writing is that its subject matter, whether explicit or implicit, has always managed to convey its meaning and make me laugh along the way. I get a kick out of some of the jokes or satire sprinkled throughout other’s writing, they will make me laugh a bit, but with Chris’ writing, and “Pigeons” in specific, makes me want to laugh long and loud. “Pigeons” is almost like an episode of Seinfeld in that it is, on the surface, just a story about an old man in a park feeding pigeons and watching a family on a playground. Essentially a story about nothing – nothing extraordinary anyway. However, the story, in its diction and images, connotes a bevy of themes and ideas. The tension between the old and the young is brought up in the old man’s (the narrator) description of the young girl’s bouncy, enthusiastic persona. In connection with this is the feeling of longing for the past, for youthfulness.
The story’s structure is one that seems atypical and human: starting with ego (the self) and the things immediately available to the ego, then focusing on the things in the background (things outside of the ego), and then after contemplating those things outside the ego, the thought process ends where it began, with the self. The narrator first describes the pigeons flocking to his scattered breadcrumbs and focuses on them enough to be able to pick out the same fat one from the multitudes of others. Once the old man hears the laughter of the girl, he focuses and closely observes the family on the playground. He notes nearly every detail of their seemingly nuclear family unit, from the kind of watch the man is wearing to the slight difference between the color of the woman’s scarf and her sweater. The story ends with the family leaving the old man to the company of two pigeons at his feet, who he returns his focus to. Some of the images are just so simple that they almost escape attention, which works in conjunction with the short sentence lengths. This use of short, stream-of-consciousness/imagistic sentences are affective because they allow the reader to take a pause and consider the last few sentences and make the connections between them.
All of this isn’t to say that there isn’t room for improvement. The largest problem in this story is punctuation. The overuse of commas and periods, though sometimes affectively working to slow the reader’s pace, screams out as some sentences become utterly unreadable. At certain points in the story – and this is a nit-picky thing – there are a few dangling modifiers which throw off both the reader’s pace and the coherency of half a paragraph. And though the shortened sentences work to the advantage of the story, there are sentences which could be linked together to make either better sentences or to create some better understanding of what the narrator is describing. Other than these few things, I think this was of the most interesting and fun pieces to have read.