Does Brautigan's quietly confident 'In Watermelon Sugar' scream autobiography?

"If you are thinking about something that happened a long time ago: Somebody asked you a question and you did not know the answer. That is my name."

This quote resonated with me enough to elicit a blog-worthy response, but let's rewind to the beginning and introduce this book with the formality it deserves and commands.

'In Watermelon Sugar' is a short postmodern, post-apocalyptic novel written by Richard Brautigan, a writer and poet known best for his two novellas, 'Trout fishing in America' and 'A Confederate General from Big Sur'. These gained enough attention for his work to be noticed and both, praised and critiqued for their dry wit and abstractness. After picking this book up, I became invested in the novel contextually, by understanding the narrative in close proximity with Brautigan's life and mental health. Growing up in sheer poverty, Brautigan's childhood was a tumultuous one in which he experienced several traumas, including the abuse of his mother from his stepfather, homelessness and the incorrect information about his biological father (subsequently causing him to change his surname for a duration of his life). This eventually, in the early 1950's, came to a head, when he was admitted to a mental institution and sectioned. He was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. During his time in the institution, he wrote his only unpublished chapbook, titled 'The God of the Martians', which was to be published by ETT Imprints (an Australian publishing house) in 2009 after being rejected by two other publishers. This was never followed through. The only section of this chapbook was written about by his daughter in her own autobiography and is as follows:

Chapter 1 My name is Edward Lincoln. My father chose my name. My mother wanted to name me Jesse, but my father thought Jesse was a name for a homosexual.

Chapter 2 My mother was white. My father was a negro. The day they were married my father's mother blew her head off with a shotgun. My mother's mother only had a nervous breakdown.

Chapter 1 suggests a strong emphasis on the name of Edward, the same confusion Brautigan had with the identification of his dad and thus, his surname. Chapter 2 implies thoughts surrounding violent death and suicide, which mirrors his own suicide, a self inflicted gunshot wound. Later, his daughter had wrote that he had spoken erratically and openly about suicide a multiplicity of times during his last years alive.

'In Watermelon Sugar', though far more subtle in these autobiographical reflections, exposes many symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, although the novel itself has not been suggested to be an autobiographical account, unlike some of his earlier work which mirrored events from his childhood. Before dissecting the chapters of this book however, it's important to understand the commonly misunderstood mental state of schizophrenia.

1. Delusions - strong beliefs of something that is not real.

2. Hallucinations - seeing, hearing or feeling something that is not there.

3. Disorganised speech - tendencies to find linear conversations difficult

4. Fear of others' intensions - abusive thoughts or paranoia towards others' intensions.

5. Catatonia - inability to move correctly.

Already in Chapter 4, "Charlie's Idea", the protagonist mentions his long walks when he stands for hours "in a single place, without hardly moving." illustrating the paralysis that is experienced in some bouts of catatonia. Brautigan's writing sparked much critique when it was catapulted to fame and remains loved for its abstractness. Would it be plausible for us to reduce this to the disorganised speech, or "word salad" that many schizophrenic individuals experience? The last sentence of Chapter 2, "My Name", reads "And I wish Margaret would leave me alone." and has no relevance to the rest of the chapter in which he describes what his name is (one of which I chose to open this post with for its sheer transparency and vulnerability). Despite this postmodern style of writing having a refreshingly bemusing influence on its reader, it also begs the question as to whether we classify Brautigan's novels as postmodern as a result of our own understanding of reality as being a linear thought process and therefore, choose not to understand his work in relation to his split from reality.