Text online: babysitter The Jack Derrida version, according to me, since I didn’t find a full integral text anywhere else.

Read Coover’s The babysitter online. It smacks of 1950’s, like the show Happy Days.

Except that this version is the violent form, insults and all. It could be that this is what all those goody-two-shoes characters really had underneath their conscious. Curiously enough, it also had some of that atmosphere one can find in Raymond Carver’s The Cathedral. Does this ever have a ring to Thomas Newman’s American Beauty or what! The type of suburbia such as the one described in Edward Scissor Hands comes to mind too. Well, I can see why this text is popular, there is a lot of sexual implications. It isn’t too strange then that this period (1969) also had the sexual revolution. I personally find all sexual commentary here a worst outbreak than the outness Victorian prudishness
had when it left those vestiges in the past.

Thought: This text is impregnated with Christian values. The sweetest reward is to have sex. Yet taboos run all throughout the text, impeding men to full fill their acts. Its only Christian moral values that hold them back. Mr. Tucker’s incessant need of an aspirin reminds me of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman with his need of new material things and his failure to see his reality and accept the present.

This also has some of Julio Cortazar’s fantasy style characteristics like those in La Isla a Mediodia (The Island in the afternoon). There is a lot of rave regarding the sentence structure on the net over this text.