Blackouts

“His voice, though fey, came hale and lucid, and when he spoke, he did so without obstruction, no wheezing, no confusion (that is, until the final hours, when he slipped into delirium, speaking nonsense and quoting from literature).”

This description of Juan’s voice at the beginning of Blackouts foreshadows his death: By discussing “the final hours,” Nene confirms Juan’s fate and establishes the novel’s movement between temporalities.

“‘My senescence,’ Juan called it. ‘An affront to youth and beauty.’

And though I knew he teased, I did feel repulsed, not by Juan himself, but by elderliness as an abstraction. I found it impossible to imagine my own adolescent body succumbing to old age, deteriorating. Back then, I had looked at Juan and thought, No way that body is my future.”

Though Nene’s fear of elderliness originates from a previous interaction with Juan when he himself was almost 18, his pride in his 27-year-old body suggests he still does not connect with future frailty. Nene considering Juan’s body as his own future body foreshadows later parallels between the two men—with the novel ultimately reversing their roles as student and teacher.

“Noncompliance is bad behavior.”

Nene and Juan quote the rules of the psychiatric hospital where they were both committed. The idea that “noncompliance” is bad alludes to the state-sponsored violence that overshadows the novel. Furthermore, because the men were partially committed to a psychiatric hospital due to their race and sexuality, the notion of “compliance” with societal expectations would require total erasure of self.