Prompt 13--Three Viewings

My first thought when I read this prompt was Margaret-Mary Walsh, as she showed up to all of the funerals.  While she wasn’t necessarily a detail that anyone else missed, she was certainly the one who stuck out to me.  However, in researching just how she is presented in each scene, I came across another name—Nettie James.  She is spotlighted in Tell-Tale, as Emil notes that “Nettie James died yesterday.  She was 103… Terrible woman.  The Herald Star made up a headline for her obituary that read ‘Nettie James FINALLY dies.’ ”  However, I entirely missed that she was also the grandmother of Mac in The Thief of Tears.  Looking back, I apparently didn’t read that monologue very well at all—thus why I did so poorly on the questions from The Thief of Tears on the test.  Anyway, the realization that everyone thought of her as a terrible, terrible person definitely colors my perception of what I read in the second monologue.  However, as far as I can tell, Nettie James is not in Thirteen Things About Ed Carpolotti, which is rather disappointing.  Thus, this reference essentially only exists to give us a preconceived notion of a woman from Tell-Tale that we will later learn much more about in The Thief of Tears. 

A more abstract motif running through these monologues is the idea of a character not being who they appear to be.  In Tell-Tale, Emil waits until the very end of his monologue to mention that he has a wife after telling a very long story about his creepy crush.  Mac in The Thief of Tears begins her monologue with the line “I’ve been stealing jewelry off corpses for years.  Grandma’ll be a fuckin’ cinch,” which is possibly the most villainous line to ever begin a piece of literature; however, she counteracts this by acting very sentimentally throughout her monologue.  The same thing happens in Ed Carpolloti, but from a different perspective—instead of the narrator appearing to be something different to the audience, we learn that Ed Carpolotti appeared different to the narrator than he really was.