Faces in the Crowd: Thinking About the Past and the Future

The final book that I have read for this class, “Faces in the Crowd”, was one of the most confusing books I have read. Although I found it much easier to read because the writing incorporated more modern words, I finished the book not really grasping the whole concept. There were many different themes of reality, fiction, ghosts, death, and living in the book and it left me feeling uncertain about what I just read. There were little bits here and there that I think I understood, but understanding the book as a whole was very complex to me.

The book starts with our first narrator, a young woman who struggles to balance her work life and aspirations with motherhood and being a wife. Writing is an escape for her, away from the tough, boring, and ordinary aspects of her typical life, but her writing is constantly interrupted by her husband and children. Her son also asked a lot of questions at the end of several sections which I thought was very strange. My first thought was that perhaps this was illustrating how much attention her children needed and how difficult it was to continuously write. This leads me to my discussion question, “why do you think the son asked so many questions?”. 

The book takes a turn when it is narrated from both the young woman and Gilberto Owen’s perspectives. Their lives are parallel to each other and even intertwined. The young woman is writing about Owen, who is writing about the young woman, who is writing about Owen…it’s just a constant loop. The young woman sees Owen’s face on the train and Owen sees the young woman’s face on the train. It’s like the young woman can see ghosts from the past and Owen can see ghosts from the future. 

I found the young woman’s obsession with the Mexican poet, Gilberto Owen, to be very interesting. She is inspired by him as a writer and is very similar to him in other aspects of their lives as well. However, she was so obsessed with him that she was even sexually attracted to him and “before going to sleep, [she] cried a little and masturbated, looking at Owen’s photo” (p. 49). I also noticed how there was a lot of sexualization and sexual remarks throughout the book. I thought this was a bit strange, but upon further reflection, I think this allowed the young woman to express her sexual identity through her writing, especially since she seemed to be very comfortable in her sexuality in her younger days. She might have been missing that significant part of her life and wanted to somehow re-experience it through her writing.