The Story Archive

Coming Through Slaughter

Michael Ondaatje · 1976 CE · Novel · Modern / American · Contemporary

Buddy Bolden, the New Orleans cornet player whose sound nobody ever recorded, cuts hair, prints a scandal sheet and plays a music that has no name yet, until he walks out of his own life for two years. A photographer who works the Storyville houses and a detective who was a boyhood friend go looking for him. Ondaatje built the book from the handful of documents that survive and left the gaps between them showing.

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Attributes

Genre
HistoricalPsychological
Theme
Art & CreationMadnessFame & GloryIsolation & Alienation
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
CreatorAnti-HeroShadow
Plot structure
Nonlinear / FracturedPolyphonicChronicle
Quest object (Greimas)
Art / Creation
Symbol / motif
MusicThe CityThe Mirror
Conflict
vs Self
Mode / tone
ModernistElegiacLyrical
Culture / tradition
Modern / American

Closest analogues