Reflection on “Jacob’s Chicken” by Milos Macourek



Response to “Jacob’s Chicken” by Milos Macourek

I love this short piece. The number of different voices that Macourek is able to layer together in this three-sentence, three-paragraph story is truly admirable.

The first thing to notice is the structure of the story in terms of form. There are three sentences that each start with the phrase “a chicken is a chicken.” The first sentence draws “you,” the reader, in with the line “you all know how a chicken looks, sure you do.” This immediately sets the reader up for what comes next in the story by conjuring up an image of a regular chicken in the reader’s head. When the reader has this image in his head, he can more fully appreciate the absurdity of the chicken that Jacob has drawn, which is the writer’s intent. This might be seen as building up an expectation, or setting up for a conflict. But Macourek then deftly turns this “you” that is addressing the reader into the teacher’s voice, addressing the students by continuing the sentence, “so go ahead and draw a chicken the teacher tells the children.” The narrator becomes one that directs the reader as well as one that simply narrates a story by telling actions and that takes on different voices. In the first sentence, the reader also becomes one of the students, in a sense, which comes back into play in the last paragraph, “there is our teacher with the whole class standing in front of the cage.” The use of “our” evokes familiarity, attachment, recognition, and also makes the reader feel as though he is there with the class, observing.

The way in which Macourek has the narrator’s voice flow into different character’s voices and thoughts, and different voices flow into one another, is well worth examining. This story has an interesting narrator. If I were to give it one name, I would say it is third person omniscient, though at times it seems to border on second person and even first person because of the way the dialogue is written. In the first paragraph, it seems we are in the teacher’s head, but we really only get his voice. By the end of the first paragraph, the narrator only gives omniscience into the chicken. In the second paragraph, our sympathy is with Professor Kapon. The third paragraph presents us with many voices and the reader gets insight into the chicken’s emotions again, “the chicken is having the time of its life, it’s moved to tears by all this care.” And finally, we end with the teacher’s voice, which is also Professor Kapon’s voice in a sense because of the reference to Kapon’s voice in the last line of the piece (“for something like that would make anyone’s blood boil” which Kapon says as “now that would make anyone’s blood boil”), which not only circles back to the beginning but also ties the three parts of the story and the voices together.

Tracing the voices in the story, we see: “the teacher tells” “the teacher says” “the teacher goes on, saying” “you see” “Professor Kapon says to himself” “you think” “the director says” “says the cashier” “wait, look” “the children are agog, they sigh” “Laura…says” “the teacher yells.” The chicken doesn’t say anything, but we know its feelings through the narrator’s omniscience. Jacob doesn’t say anything, but we observe him. Because the style of the dialogue is such that there are no quotation marks and the long sentences are only punctuated by commas, it is hard to tell at times if the narrator is telling us something or if it is a part of a character’s speech, or if it really matters because by doing this, the narrator is simply another character and another voice, adding to the many already present.

I studied this piece when we were writing our “extraordinary ( ordinary” exercises because Macourek does a very good job with making something very extraordinary seem entirely commonplace and plausible. (Would this piece be considered magical realism?) Some points where he does this extremely effectively can be seen in the language. The first example is at the end of the first sentence: “nothing makes it happy about being on top of a teacher’s cabinet, so, deciding not to be chicken, it flies off through the open window.” The language here is very simple and the action simply happens. The part that strikes me as making this “ordinary” is the phrase “so, deciding.” It is very straightforward and clear-cut. Another example is the word “hence” in “a chicken won’t fly too far, hence it ends up next door.” Macourek is using a sentence structure that suggests logic to make the content seem very rational by putting it into a logical, “A, hence B” form. Another word that struck me as moving the story along without explanation for the seemingly impossible actions is “voilà” in “the chicken flies off, and voilà, Professor Kapon follows, he flies over the fence.” This word evokes a sense of the magical and seems to remind us that we are reading a story, and in a story, anything can happen, and we accept it. It almost seems the language of the story here is mocking itself a little, laughing at itself, which makes the reader accept it all the more readily, I think. It keeps the story moving forward without loading it down with unnecessary explanations that would conflict with the pacing.

Another thing I noticed (and loved) was the repetition (three times, once in each paragraph) of the long phrase “Jacob’s chicken really looks more like a turkey, but then not quite, for it also resembles a sparrow and also a peacock, it’s as big as a quail and as lean as a swallow.” They are the same words, but each time the phrase is repeated, it is said in a different tone of voice. The first is the teacher poking fun at the drawing, laughing at it, the second is Professor Kapon taking the phrase down in an almost scientific, field-observation tone, and the third is said in a tone of admiration by the teacher. It is amazing how Macourek manages to bring out each of these very different tones and make them work and get them across to the reader. I think this is somewhat through context, since the words are almost exactly the same in each instance, and also through the words that he uses around the phrase, such as “a peculiar pullet” in the beginning vs. “look at that gorgeous orange head” in the end. But the way Macourek is able to bring out these different tones and voices and make them work together and come to life is definitely worth further examination in order to learn from him.

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