Ondaatje and Billy

Ondaatje creates a beautiful and violent account of Billy The Kid through his mixture of form and content. First, he takes the happenings of this figure and makes a historical and exaggerated fiction style to develop the strange events during his life. Ondaatje does this well with the different forms of poetry and fusion of prose, dialog, and pictures. The prose provides a voice of narration to allow the reader to delve into the personality of Billy The Kid, while the short block poetry and interludes show the voice of Ondaatje trying to account the events as if he were there witnessing them. The dialog creates a sense of history for the reader to maybe grasp that the dialog was the actual words of Billy and his interviewer. Also, the pictures appear to be the closest to the actual account of this figure. His devices not only function well in this sense, but also in the vast amount of speakers in this collection. With the many intertwined characters, the collection serves as a type of documentary. I also enjoy the fact that the story follows a sort of stereotypical western plot with the undertone of historical “accuracy.”
The tension between the beautiful descriptions and the violent juxtaposition serves as a means to the graphic American storytelling. For example, the grotesque account of drinking too much allows this image to be defamiliarized and seen in a more artistic way: “…I start throwing up, the wind carrying it like a yellow ribbon” (70). Then, even more light and beautiful: “flies out like a pack of miniature canaries. A flock. A covey of them, like I’m some magician or something” (70). I love this tension, showing an ugly side to the cliché party, drinking, sex story. I also noticed Ondaatje’s repetition of oranges and orange peels, which kind of represent the feminine quality or contribution to this cowboy story: “oranges/peeled half peeled/bright as hidden coins against the pillow/…sits on her leg here/sweeping off the peels/traces the thin bones on me” (21).
My favorite part of the book is the “book” on pages 98-102. This sort of collage serves like an excerpt to show the exaggeration and fast-paced storytelling that is stereotypical of a Western. The media in here shows a sort of fabrication among the historical documentation of Billy The Kid that justifies his legacy. It shows what a charismatic, cool under pressure, and ruthless brute showing some compassion. Basically, it pegs his personality in mere pages that shows what the whole collection was trying to convey. It also shows the improbability of some of the actions of Billy. I believe this medium was intended to be recounted for children, which omits the realistic gore and sex and adult themes and happenings that much of the collection conveys. I like how it contrasts with the story about the cat under the floorboards: a violent account versus the glorified one you read in novels and see in the movies. Overall, Ondaatje’s strength lies in the ability to capture different mediums in order to tell a layered biography and story, which incorporates appearance versus reality and the idea of realism.