A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, with its unique style that attracts the attention of the reader from the very beginning is a good example of self reflexive fiction. Self reflexive fiction, improving and changing from the time of Tristram Shandy has found a new life at the hands of Dave Eggers. He offers the reader to take an active role in his reading. "The Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book" section addresses directly to the reader saying "if you have already read the preface

the best of his ability. Dave, going through this traumatic event in his early twenties, doesn’t have the opportunities that most people his age have to be young and carefree because he was forced to assume a parental role. This misfortunate, heartbreaking story is something that one simply cannot help but sympathize with, and what we learn in part III of the novel is that Dave knows that. He uses it to shape himself, to form his identity, and the way he responds to people and situations. By doing

the company, Mae focuses on her work but soon learns that another, almost more important, aspect of the job is keeping up with social media, which prompts her to pay more attention and rise to a very high achieving number in the PartiRank. At a company party, a mysterious new man appears named Kalden, a man who complicates Mae’s life at the Circle and her relationship with Annie, who thinks he might be a spy. As Mae continues to rise in station at her CE job, her work-home balance becomes increasingly

one's experience, and see how they have developed and matured. The essence of a memoir is to look back at one's experience, and see how they have developed and matured. This is no different in Dave Eggers fictitious memoir, A Heartbreaking Story of Staggering Genius. To explore what has changed a person it is important to look at what most of the person's time was spent doing. In Dave's situation, there is no shadow of a doubt, at the age of 22, his life revolved around the security and well

John Van Den Anker Thoughts and Memories “Here is a drawing of a Stapler” (xlv). In A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius, Eggers fabricates an unique narrative of intertwined thought and dialogue. The presence of the stapler drawing at the end of the acknowledgements has a bifold meaning: it serves as a representation of both his and the reader’s relationships with the text. Eggers weaves together a narrative that includes his genuine thoughts that oppose the “almost entirely reconstructed

postmodernism use is being used because everything else has been taken, so by blending in certain creations together, you can make something new. In postmodernism, authors like Tim O’Brien, who wrote The Things They Carried and A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, both authors are telling the reader a story in the first person with stream of conscious, just like a modernist writer would do. However, the two authors, similarly, are unreliable at points in the books because they

unreliable narrators. I plan to investigate what makes up an unreliable narrator in both a fictional work and memoir seeing in a trickster lens. It’s a form of play, but alas, why be funny? Dave Eggers and E.L Doctorow create hilarious protagonists who are fiercely unreliable, and almost seems as if they're schizophrenic and/or insane. To give some background, Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a tragic memoir. The narrator, Eggers, writes about the death of both his parents, and becoming

Dave Eggers was born on March 12, 1970 in Boston, Massachusetts. Eggers was the son of a lawyer and a school teacher. Although he was born in Boston, Eggers was raised in Lake Forest, Illinois. Eggers went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study journalism, but then tragedy struck for the young college student. Both his father and mother both became ill with cancer and died a short time later. After the death of Eggers parents, he decided that he had nothing left in Illinois and

"Everything I've ever written is to understand something, some idea, some emotion". This idea lends to understanding how the autobiographical story telling of Holden and Dave helps them achieve some semblance of therapy. Though “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” exists as an acknowledged memoir, Holden Caulfield still gives his story through a first person lens, making his story every ounce as autobiographical as Dave’s. Because the relationships that Dave and Holden cultivate over the course

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the memoir of Dave Eggers. It specifically deals with the passing of his parents (within a very short time of one another) and his responsibilities dealing with raising his little brother. His overall style in this book is VERY casual. He is the epitome of a writer who “writes the way he speaks”. The novel is more like an extended internal monologue with himself rather than a story. I wouldn’t say this novel has the most incredible plot sequence but it