Postmodern Novel, Postmodern Diner

In Bailey's Cafe, the characters are fragments of people. Each is only able to present one side of them that, as “Bailey” tells us from the start, is not all there is to them. However, their traumatic pasts have led them to conceal pieces of themselves and present others, and not necessarily the best of themselves. The narrative is similarly fragmented. There are no quotation marks for speech, no clear separation of time and space, and the narrative voice tends to change without warning.

This structure is vaguely reminiscent of Joyce's Ulysses. It similarly fails to differentiate voices and defies structure which leads to an ample amount of intended ambiguity. This, as we have discussed in class, asks a lot of the reader and also forces them to latch onto what little they know about the characters from isolated incidents and traumatic moments.

The structure of Bailey's Cafe the novel is very much representative of Bailey's Cafe the place. The novel exists as a sort of hub of voices often competing to tell their stories but never really able to tell the full story. This is exactly how Bailey experiences the stories of each of the people that enter his diner. With the structure of the novel and the structure of the diner working in favor of one another, the reader almost feels as if they become Bailey and must watch these poor women and men slump through their diner seeking..... seeking what?

Comfort, solace, warmth, pain, sex, ice, wine, hash, or any number of things. And we feel their pain. But, perhaps we as readers feel it a little more fully than Bailey as he seems to have disassociated from it. He understands from years of toil how the diner works while we have only just strolled inside. This makes the damage of the real world that much more dangerous to us and creates an almost unbearable closeness in the scenes we must witness the characters endure.