"Being a journalist is about telling. This could be the end of mass media," muses Carl Streator, the narrator of Lullaby, a book that goes about with savage poise and double espresso urgency. Chuck Palahniuk's latest creation of pop-nihilist genius brandishes the threat of the fatality of the spoken word.
Carl Streator is a middle-aged reporter who has created himself a new life after the tragic, unexplainable deaths of his wife and young child more than two decades ago. Finding work at a large newspaper he is assigned to publish a series of articles on SID's, sudden infant death syndrome, as a human interest story to attract readers. The narrator notes that doctors can only take shots in the dark and try to piece together patterns in SID's cases. Streator himself stumbles upon one. His recurring discovery of a certain "African culling song" a.k.a lullaby, at each of the deaths leads him to believe that it's not crib death responsible for the fatalities. It is the same poem he had read to his wife and child the night before they died. With this discovery, unintentional memorization of the eight line poem (Palahniuk never reveals the exact words of the rhyme to us, but he says "It's about animals going to sleep,") turns Streator from a bored journalist to a reluctant serial killer, in one humorously macabre scene accidentally killing five people within a half an hour period. Trying to redeem himself for the deaths he inadvertently causes, Streator decides to destroy all of the remaining books. He sees it as his duty to prevent the poem from getting into the wrong hands. With the poem, someone could easily end the human race. Enter Helen Hoover Boyle. A former trailer park welfare mother who, like our protagonist, killed those who she loved by reading the accursed rhyme. She rose from her state by turning into an assassin for the government (her weapon of choice being the culling song), and using the profits to start a profitable real estate agency, specializing in none other than haunted houses.
Silko's short story "Lullaby" lends itself well to close reading and analysis. "Lullaby" is a story whose themes can be interpreted in many different ways. ... The story's title, "Lullaby", served as a symbol in the story. ... The lullaby represented Ayah's strong desire to be with her children. The lullaby also represented the unchanging nature of the earth. ...
W.H. Auden, the distinguished poet, playwright and author, was of the opinion that "a poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language" (W.H. Auden n. pag.). In his poem "Lullaby" (Auden 29), there is a clear focus on the expression of love. The speaker, who is talki...
The soft music accompanying the lyrics create the sense of a lullaby, however the lullaby is betrayed by the distorted, harsh rhythm of "well be alright, yeah alright, I need you close please stay tonight " suggesting that the false sense of security cannot endure despite a desperate plan by her father to "keep his little girl". ...
This analysis was one of the first to show that babies are born with both a short and a long term memory. ... Infants are easily soothed by a familiar lullaby or story heard frequently while in the womb of them by one that is just been introduced. ...
Running wild in a cage, suffering from beauty, and alone in her popularity throughout her entire life, Norma Jean Mortenson had as much struggle as success. One may more easily recognize her by her later stage name, Marilyn Monroe. Her heart was silently yelling for help through her many roles on screen searching for approval and a stable happiness. Moving from guardian to guardian as a child, Marilyn felt as though her wild imagination was being held captive. This feeling of restraint continued when her physical attractiveness became the focus of her roles while her dream was to become a seri...
