MADNESS, INSPIRATION AND GENIUS

Madness, Inspiration and Genius

Madness, Inspiration and Genius

Answer 1

Coming Through Slaughter in writing by Michael Ondaatje tells of Buddy Bolden's fall into his own hell. Ondaatje's innovative is full of art and attractiveness and tells the article of a instrumentalist, who was unsurpassed in his time whose work leveraged the melodies of several later generations. It is a article of an artist who laboured to transcend life's miseries and who endured with despair, madness, loneliness, and the viciousness of life. The novel centers on Buddy Bolden, a New Orleans cornet contestant, and early swing genius, who fallen out of sight for two years and then made a triumphant though short-lived return, before staining in an asylum. In approaching Through Slaughter, Buddy Bolden struggled to live between a public and a private and to deal with the stress between gut feeling and consciousness. Bolden's emotions are best glimpsed in his music, which is a distinct pattern of the blues that expresses the struggles that certainly enclosed him. Bolden is the alienated and isolated creative person unable to live inside the structures of alignment and control. The constant claims that audiences makes on him drives Bolden into insanity. These are the claims that had initiated a transformation in Bolden's character. If only he had known the harm in these demands, he would have been able to protect himself. Instead, it destroyed his life and career.

All of Buddy's audiences are selfish, and all have their own needs from Buddy. Each plays a role in Buddy's life, making it seem like he is the most important person in their lives. While all have their own interest in mind. For Webb, a long time friend, Bolden does not exist as a private person with private needs, but only as a public person. Webb was the only person who searched for Buddy when he disappeared and who was central to seducing Buddy back to the public life of music, away from his life with Robin. He continuously pleaded, "Why don't you come back, what good are you here, you're doing nothing, you're wasting..." (Odaatje 83). Here it seems like Webb is the only one who cares what happened to Bolden but his focus is really on Bolden's career. He does not question why Bolden left, instead all Webb wants is for Bolden to return to making music. Since Webb cannot create his own music; he creates Bolden, whom must play to please his audience. Webb represents the supreme pressure of the audience. This is the reason why Webb is so critical of Bolden's talent being wasted in silence.

Other friends, however, have no interest in Buddy's music, but only the private life of Bolden. Buddy's friend, Bellocq, influences Buddy's social world and tempts him away from the world of his audience into a world of silence. Bellocq is also an artist, a tortured and unstable being, and an outsider who eventually commits suicide. Through Bellocq's influence, Buddy's thinking quickly begins to resemble that of Bellocq's, "the ...