Entry 2-Aye, And Gomorroah

'What will you give me? I want something,' I said. 'That's why I came. I'm lonely. Maybe I want to find out how far it goes. I don't know yet.'

        I think this story is so unique, and groundbreaking, because it feels different from anything I've ever read. I can best understand it is as a hybrid. The story combines the most outlandish science-fiction-y, surreal portrayal of the future with a writing style, tone and theme most comparable in my mind with Hemingway's work. There is something distinctly modernist about the loneliness of these characters (and something distinctly Hemingway in the writing style). It wasn't actually until I started writing this post that I recognized just how true this is.
        The above line in particular, chosen because it exemplifies, in my mind, the central struggle of the protagonist, could be in any "normal" work of American modern fiction--while I see it more specifically in a narrative of McCarthy or Hemingway. When I read the quote, I myself feel confused. The first reason is that I don't understand the meaning of the line "how far it goes". It could be an ambiguous vocalization of this nameless character's desire to desire, wanting to know what that feels like, or it could be something less figurative that I completely missed the meaning of in the first reading (and second skimming) of this piece.
        But for my purposes it doesn't really matter.
       The other aspect of confusion that I feel is less literal. The entire line of dialogue is confused, exudes confusion, because of the tragic confusion at the center of this person's perspective. The person (he/she/it) wants to know what desire feels like, and maybe can't even desire this completely. He/she/it feels empty, feels like a part of him/her is missing because of this emptiness--this thing that everyone else gets, but he/she cannot. The girl that he/she talks with, the frelk, equates her "complex" to necrophilia, and calls the protagonist a "corpse in free fall!", unabashedly associating this person in front of her with a dead body. The protagonist's lack of desire, of sex, of identity means to the society, or to this girl at least, that he/she is without life. There is a serious complex, then, involved in both of their states. Both are the outsiders of the society, neither seem to really understand the nature of that they want, and both feel isolated by the society for being who they are, or trying to.
       If this isn't modernism, than I don't know what is. And if it's not also something more, by the very nature of it's new and create perspective, then I suppose I fundamentally am misunderstanding the genre of science fiction. Because this is what the genre has to offer, at it's best. Recurring, timeless themes, ideas and attitudes from a point of view that takes one out of the existing social norms and the extent of "realistic" perspective and into a point of view from which these ideas can be seen through fresh eyes, through new eyes. Through much cooler eyes.