23 pages • 46 minutes read
Denis JohnsonEmergency
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1991A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Fuckhead
Fuckhead, the narrator of “Emergency,” is an aimless young man who uses illicit substances in a 1970s, unnamed Midwestern town. He spends his days working a meaningless night job at a hospital and getting high with his orderly friend, Georgie. Fuckhead has an acute sense of his world, and his story has a surreal quality punctuated by gritty details. He observes the absurdity of his situation and relays it with deadpan humor.
Fuckhead seeks meaning and joy in his life, although it is unclear whether he believes he deserves those things. When Georgie asks him if “everything [Fuckhead] touch[es] turn[s] to shit” (69), all he can reply is, “No wonder they call me Fuckhead” (69). Despite this tone of resignation, Fuckhead notices and yearns for beauty and any experience that can shake him out of the despair of his existence. He finds something like it at the end of the story when he and Georgie wake up in the truck after a bender, and Fuckhead experiences “the beauty of the morning” (69).
Georgie
Fuckhead’s friend Georgie is an orderly at the hospital and the procurer of their drugs. Fuckhead tells the reader that Georgie was “a pretty good friend of mine” (57), and throughout the story, the two share a certain degree of intimacy and honesty, despite their altered mental state; Georgie calls Fuckhead out on his inability to do anything right and warns him that this will “ride [him] to [his] grave” (69). Although they’re high, the conversation is honest, and Georgie doesn’t abandon Fuckhead despite his frustrations with him.
At the end of the story, Fuckhead realizes that he and Georgie are different in their approaches to life. Georgie views himself as a savior and perhaps an inherently good person, while Fuckhead, up to that point, has been resigned to his own damaged, passive self. Georgie is the character of action in the story, the one who removes the knife from Terrence’s eye, the one who drives them around, the one who carves up the dead rabbit. Fuckhead observes from the sidelines. Ultimately, Georgie has the final say in the story, his claim that he “save[s] lives” (72) ringing out, suggesting both ironic and humorous ego but also an earnest compassion for others.
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By Denis Johnson
