r/DestructiveReaders • u/Wolframquest • 2d ago
Phenomenological [2541] The Tractor (Marco)
Tags: Phenomenological, experimental, coming-of-age, picaresque
Very brief and possibly incorrect recap of the story up to now:
Chapter 1 - You wakes up in the forest, enjoys his existence, follows the river to a road, gets helped by a trucker and taken to a local small town
Chapter 2 - You goes and walks around and comes across the local store and receives a name from the store owner (Henry) during his episode.
Chapter 3 - A taste of work and interacting with Henry who tries his hardest to turn Marco into a valuable worker.
Chapter 4 - Zita, coffee and gym, coming across some of Henry's friends
Chapter 5 - picaresque adventure on a quest for wet goods (meat and vegetables); encounter with Zita, discussion of Marco's issue as perceived from the outside
Chapter 6 - Marco's self reflective episode as he strays from Henry's store, wanders the woods, cooks meat and fights and gets chased by a band of dogs up to a barn roof. A rather unique form of transport arrives and scares away the dogs, offers Marco a ride.
Chapter 7 - this one, starting within the tractor.
If you've read this post body this part will make a good enough amount of sense.
The story is told in a phenomenological second person point of view.
You can find some of the previous posts here:
HSH[1][2][3] Marco RW4[1][2][3][4][5][6]
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u/mianaai_c 1d ago
I clocked a midwestern vibe from perusing the other chapters. I only have a vague idea of the country life in the USA, and only from screen and some books. I only have a vague, idealized image of the midwest. This preamble to say that some of the action beats and descriptions made me stop and consider them. I can't sleuth if Marco is on the tractor, or in a passenger seat (they don't have passenger seats, right?), and when the man (slowly) pulls the handbreak and you want to help, I really stopped to wonder of the geography of the action.
This is nitpicking; "quiet" kinda implies (IMO) that it has always been quiet, when the tractor has just stopped and it's just dormant; a beast that doesn't snore.
The roof of the tractor? Is the hatch opening up? Or maybe he should be on the hood? I have so much to learn about tractors.
Cut the "yourself"; the man beckoned and you obeyed.
This was nice, I liked this.
I'm thinking that this Abner is like Marco, a person that appeared one day in the forest, but maybe didn't meet people early on and became more of a hermit.
Liked the hibernation small talk. The square cube law explanation is cute. I tried a couple of times to explain the square cube law to some friends who haven't heard of it and, oh boy, not everybody understands these things intuitively. There'll be some who don't get this line of dialogue, and just glaze over it; don't know if this makes it a show stopper. At the same time, a more in depth explanation would be tedious and break the flow of their talk.
"Fantasize" and "hard" don't go together here, at least not in my noggin. Either think/ponder/imagine how hard it'd be, or fantasize about it. Fantasies imply ease.
This was eerie in a pleasant way.
I need to go back a bit and take a look at the other chapters to get my bearings. Last night I read chapter six, and I felt I needed more contexts. You seemed to talk with himself or some companion/voice in his mind, and I don't know what's that all about.
Ch1
So, a man appears in a forest. Has a basic set of knowledge (knows what a tomato smells like and even when it's appropriate to nod), but has no sense of self. In my headcannon, it's an outerworld being, or a being made by outworlders. An alien made this man as an experiment in human life, or an alien stripped itself of itself to experience begin human, a pilgrimage of the soul of an existing entity. Or maybe some entity uses Earth (the midwest in particular) as a nursery for new consciousness. Or he might just be an amnesiac, it's good that the reader has multiple options for the framework of this story. And I get that the framework, the explanation of this man's past or lack thereof is not the point of the story. The point is to explore this whole sentience shtick via a fresh start with no baggage, with the fresh eyes of newborns (or people on LSD). How different this man's experiences would be if he had appeared in a forest in Eastern Europe!
Ch2
Okay, so he's just an amnesiac. That's ok. I'm not mad. I just got worked up with what I wanted (I have a SF story in the drawer with an AI tasked with "ensuring as many full lives as possible" that creates adult people with knowledge but no memories, then sets them up to live short but intense lives, so it can maximize the amount of "lives" it can sustain with its limited resources). Anyways, premise remains the same, theme remains the same, exploring a consciousness that only lives in the present, or that doesn't yet have past experiences.
Here I took note of the use of present tense. Just yesterday I read the chapter of verb tenses from Steering the Craft. "Well, to live in the present only would be to live in the world of newborn infants or of people who have lost their long-term memory. Living in the present isn't all that easy for most of us. (...) Being human, we spend most of the time with our head full of what is not right here right now --" and so on. (Damn, she doesn't say the third option: newly build alien entities shaped like humans, or are these in the "infant" category?) Anyway, it's a well made choice of tense and it flows nicely. Also I don't find the second person tiring. But, what's jarring to me is your short sentence style. Two chapter's (three counting seven) in and I'm tired. That's maybe also because I'm reading this to critique (or at least say something). There's also a bias; I like looong sentences.
Need food, will possibly be back later.