You don’t need a period to end a sentence.
Well, alright, technically you do. But in the reality of the literary world, there are many other devices that can be used to simulate the use of a period without actually using one. For example, D. H. Lawrence’s work “The Elephant Is Slow To Mate” uses numerous line and stanza breaks to force the reader’s eye to slow, similar to the titular elephant’s mating speed.
John Okada’s No-No Boy, on the other hand, reads like a Japanese bullet train.
<— Click on it.
But it does so with a purpose. Rather than speeding along to compensate for having nothing interesting to say, Okada establishes this frenzied pace to both help the reader insert themselves into the mind of main character Ichiro Yamada and to characterize him as a neurotic person who exhausts himself for every moment he spends inside his own head.
One of the best examples of this pacing technique in motion (no pun intended) is a section of the novel’s third chapter, where Yamada thinks over his experiences with the American educational system:
“To be a student in America studying engineering was a beautiful life. Where was the slide rule, he asked himself, where was the shaft of exacting and thrilling discovery when I had needed it most? If only I had pictured it and felt it in my hands, I might well have made the right decision, for the seeing and feeling of it would have pushed out the bitterness with the greenness of the grass on campus and the hardness of the chairs in the airy classrooms with the blackboards stretched wall-to-wall behind the professor, and the books and the sandwiches and the bus rides coming and going.”
Whew. Take a deep breath. Now, I’ve got a few questions for you.
- Did you notice the perspective shift?
That’s the most immediate goal of this rapid-acceleration flow of consciousness style: This quickly-paced design refuses to allow the reader enough time to understand they’re being shoved into Yamada’s mind. The shift occurs during the above quote’s second sentence, where Okada writes, “…he asked himself, where was the shaft of exacting and thrilling discovery when I had needed it most” (Okada 49, My Bolding). But there’s no time to halt and question perspectives, because, by the next sentence, the reader is blitzing through Yamada’s mental stream at the same rate as the character himself.
2. Did you like that long sentence? Do you want to read more of them?
These ‘dips into Yamada’s mind’ happen at multiple points during the novel, and serve to aid in his characterization. Hyper-extended lines like these can be exhausting, so Okada spaces them out to make the read more enjoyable. But there’s a catch: Yamada doesn’t get these breaks from his own mind. He’s in there 24/7, and every time we’re forced to join him, we get a brief reminder of how exhausting his thought process is. By imagining the numerous instances of these worry-rants and regret-rants Yamada pushes upon himself, the character’s harsh reactions to certain actions by other characters become more understandable.
By forcing the reader into Yamada’s mind, Okada places them in a position to understand the emotional exhaustion that often results in aggressive reactions towards those around him. Since Yamada’s struggle is very much internal, this process is nearly invisible to other characters, who see Yamada only as a high-strung individual. This further contributes to a reader’s ability to associate themselves with the character and to understand the disconnect between the reality of his emotions and how they are perceived by the outside world.
Lawrence, D. H. “The Elephant Is Slow to Mate.” Poets.org, Academy of American Poets, 4 Sept. 2018, www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/elephant-slow-mate.
Okada, John. No-No Boy. University of Washington Press, 2014.