Town News

In Coming Through Slaughter, Buddy Bolden is the person in charge off choosing the information that will go in “The Cricket”, town magazine. Buddy published all the information he could find and from every source he could. Ondaatje tells us: “The Cricket” studied broken marriages, gossip about certain jazzmen, and a servant’s memoirs told everyone a certain politician spent twenty minutes every morning deciding what shirt to wear”. This sentence tells us that the sort of news Buddy Bolden was interested in was news about things that could go wrong with someone’s if or career. Ondaatje writes:” The Cricket” contained excessive reference to death”. The news Bolden chose were essentially dark or sad, reflecting his fears of what could happen to him. Ondaatje continues: “The possibilities were terrifying to Bolden and he hunted out examples obsessively as if building a wall”. Bolden used the connection to the news that “The Cricket” gave him as a way to recollect more and more ways that everything could go, therefore, feeding his fears more and more with every article.