Interpreting Themes In The Short Story Emergency By Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson uses the short story “Emergency” to convey a few varying themes. One of these themes is unconscious fantasy versus actuality , which is caused by the drugs taken at the beginning of the story. We can recognize Johnson develop this theme when Georgie and the narrator are lying in the flatbed of Georgie’s orange pickup truck. “I want to go to church,” Georgie suggested. “Let’s go to the county fair.” Given their drug-addled state, it is difficult to tell their lucid thoughts from their drug induced hallucinations. Furthermore, this is shown while they are lost and still driving, Georgie cannot recall the rides at the fair, which distracts him, and he ends up hitting a rabbit which introduces us to the theme life after death. Reinforced at the beginning of the short story, in a blood drenched operating room where Georgie cannot seem to clean up all the “goop.” After cleaning up the blood Terrence Weber comes in with a knife sticking out of his eye, and continues to live after Georgie pulls the knife out of Weber’s eye. To highlight this further the jackrabbit that they hit with the pickup truck is pregnant, and Fuckhead becomes a temporary mother to the bunnies Georgie saved after running over the mother.
When it appears that they are in a “military graveyard, filled with rows and rows of….. markers over soldiers’ graves.” On the “farther side of the field” Fuckhead believes that they are seeing angels “...descending out of a brilliant blue summer..” However in actuality, “It’s the drive-in, man!” The unconscious fantasy versus actuality theme is related to the life after death theme that seem to coincide throughout the short