Narrative Transformations
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with all drinking games, imiocent questions do not seem so innocent the more
one drinks, and feelings have a way of being hurt. In a bid to uphold a perceived
slight on Doe made by Adam, Joel offers this: “I’ve never pretended I was a
character from a comic book" (18). But instead of Adam copping to the charge
by drinking from his beer, Roberta "turns [his] hostile joke into [a] confession
and she tells about meeting a man who she felt deeply connected to but there
was a secret priority in his life’’ that made their life difficult. That priority had to
do with this person dressing as a superhero. So she did her research and found
out that this character in question married another superhero and that filled her
with hope. To become part of his world, she designed her own costume modeled
on the Scarlet Witch. The confession closes the evening and the party breaks up
and everyone heads out into the night alone—except, of course, Adam and
Roberta, who stand united, connected in a deeper understanding.
In a sense the story ends where it began—though this time The Vision
is not alone on the playground in his face paint and costume, but at home where
he belongs with his paramour, the Scarlet Witch. This is the hook and the
reversal of the story: the promise of coupledom—a promise that has escaped our
narrator, Joel. Indeed, early in the story Joel tells us that his girlfriend has left
him and doing so, she seems to have taken his ability to enter into a grownup
world as well. The undercurrent of bitterness that runs through this reminisce
must find root here. For it is “the tyranny of the Vision and the Scarlet Witch,”
as Joel recalls, that had “all been a little much for us poor singles” (21).
If The Vision drew inspiration from Marvel Comics in order to exploit
the connection between people and their imaginations, “Super Goat Man” is
symbolic of a postmodern glossing of the real with the fantastic—that is, the two
are a logic of one: reality is the fantastic and the fantastic is reality. In Lethem’s
story, Super Goat Man exists as both an ontological reality and as a fiction,
specifically a comic book superhero. That is how he is understood. It is not the
case that some strange force has allowed him to wrest himself out of the pages
of a comic book into the world at large, rather he already lives in the world at
large. This fact is simply taken for granted.
Like “The Vision,” “Super Goat Man” is a memory piece. This story is
in three sections, with each section advancing the narrative about ten years into
the future. The story opens with Super Goat Man moving into the commune on
Cobble Hill, Brooklyn where 13 year old Everett lives with his parents.13 Super
Goat Man does not have an alternate or secret identity. “Sometime after they
shot Kennedy,” he tells Everett, “I just realized Ralph Gersten wasn’t who I
was” (125).14 As a neighbor, Super Goat Man resonates more with the fathers
than with the kids and that is probably because he is part of their comic book
reading past. Everett muses that for the fathers perhaps Super Goat Man
represented “some lost possibility in their own lives” (120). For the kids on the
block, though, he is “only another of the men who sat on the stoops in sleeveless
undershirts on hot summer days,” and even the “two fleshy little horns on his