Response to Denis Johnson's "Emergency"

        Throughout Emergency Johnson intertwines a dream-like state with the real-life happenings that occur at an everyday job. It's interesting how he seems to draw on the comical aspects that of a job in the ER but relates them to the audience within this "drug trip." Having experience working in the ER I found the descriptions and attitudes of the Nurse and the doctor quite amusing and for the most part accurate with some exaggeration here and there, but not much. 

          Johnson makes the two main characters seem like the ultimate drug addicts especially Georgie who, after mopping the floor clean still thinks its still covered in blood, which makes for an interesting parallel considering they work in a Catholic hospital. One tends to assume that Catholic hospitals or anything of religious backgrounds are the utmost righteous.Clearly that is not the case here. This hospital doesn't seem like the normal hospital from the start when we're introduced to a man who has a knife through one eye, all the while the untouched eye is glass yet he claims he can still see. The knife is in his eye because his wife caught him "eying" their neighbor which provides some satire as to the reason she wanted to blind him completely. Not to mention one wonders if the hospital is Catholic, does that mean the neighborhood is as well, and if so do Catholic neighborhoods have "eye-stabbing wives?" One asks because Terrence, made a comment about only living three blocks away which is why he was able to walk there. The doctor is hated, but don't we expect that? We assume he is arrogant and only thinks in terms of himself. He use terms such as "eye man" "gas man" that would suggest he really doesn't care who they are or what it is they really do but he knows he needs them because he's way out of his league when it comes to removing hunting knives from the head.

            Interestingly enough, Johnson has the ability to make a drug trip seem more like real life than just being high. In other words he makes it appear as though all of the things the narrator and Georgie experienced could happen to anyone without being high or on drugs. The first part of the story is similar to that of a late night at an ER, meaning its spontaneous and unknowing. The ER has a haunted, mysterious feel to it, and its full of unexpectedness and surprise which is how Johnson relays the beginning of the story. The audience is a bit unclear as to what's going on until the understanding is made that both characters are high. The trip to the fair is where things seems to get ironic because Georgie and the narrator use the fair as a getaway from their hectic lives, when in reality they're already "gone" so-to-speak. This drug trip is almost understandable. Picking up the narrators AWOL friend Hardee is just another plus. It seems everyone and everything along with Georgie's truck that fails to have working headlights. It seems the truck matches its owner.