Clockers: Narrative Nuances

In his landmark novel Clockers, author Richard Price employs a narrative style, which exposes the reader to both ends of the legal spectrum. The narrative alternates from the first-person perspectives of Strike, the cocaine dealer, and Rocco, the detective assigned to the case in which Strike finds himself implicated. Through this narrative structure, Price introduces the reader to a holistic assessment of life in the urbanized war zone of fictional Dempsy, New Jersey, where the basic meaning of “self-defense” is insufficient for purposes of communicating its importance. By allowing the reader to view this setting from both the perspective of the hunter and the hunted, Price reveals a vicious cycle of violence and illness that operates at the very core of so many urban locales, dictating every move and motivation of its residents.

When confronted by Rocco regarding Daryl’s murder, Strike’s brother, Victor, initially claims “self-defense” continuing to repeat this defense, despite that Rocco almost immediately exposes Victor’s account as entirely unbelievable, not least of all because eyewitness testimony directly contradicts it. Nevertheless, Victor continues to stick to his story of “self-defense” (Price 290). In time, the reader understands what Victor means by this: in settings as depraved and devoid of humanity as Dempsy, each day is an exercise in “self-defense,” both against internal and external demons. As Price’s narrative structure evolves in its alternating pattern, we come to see Rocco as no different from Strike with regard to these demons and their capacity for the wholesale destruction of lives.

When Price recounts the first hit of Rodney and Errol, against clockers responsible for depriving them of a cut of drug-related profits, the victims in question are murdered while pleading with Rodney and Errol to the following effect: “Please mister…I’m sorry man, I’m sorry … it’s the sickness” (Price 99). In the world created by Price, physical sickness and vile illness is woven into the social fabric of daily existence (like a societal infestation), as elucidated by and through Price’s alternating narrative: through Strike’s perspective, both Errol’s AIDS and Victor’s chronic stomach ailments are perceived, whereas Rocco’s narrative is equally revealing and disturbing in evidencing his mental illness. While Strike, Victor, and Errol, for example, are all aggrieved players in Dempsy’s urban warzone, perpetuating its ills through their respective trades, Rocco to is enslaved by the streets of Dempsy, the turbulence of which he exacerbates through his obsession with death and that which allows for it to occur with frequency. Indeed, one begins to consider that the whole of Rocco’s material existence is no less dependent on the drug trade than those of Strike, Rodney, Errol or Daryl.

What begins to emerge from Price’s narrative structure is the manner in which ghettoized urbanity has come to dominate the American cityscape, perpetuated by the symbiosis that exists between the hunted and their hunters. Dempsy comes to be seen as a massive concrete holding facility, which Rocco and his kind keep under constant surveillance. As such, the reader glimpses Rocco’s perspective and understands not only how he creates the circumstances necessary to further his obsessive tactics, but also the manner in which he unjustly pursues Strike, whose perspective on the matter makes clear that he neither murdered Daryl nor knows precisely who did. In this sense, the alternative narrative employed by price highlights the lack of interactivity between the hunters and the hunted; a wholesale disconnect between Rocco’s kind and Strike’s street-hardened community, which is illustrated through a segregated narrative style. To this end, Rocco confuses “lifestyle” with “motive” in identifying Victor as somehow too hard-working to have committed a murder, as though those working to make ends meet through the illegal sale of drugs could not possibly be working hard.

Accordingly, the alternating narrative also provides a glimpse into the professional landscape of Dempsy and other such settings. The technical nuances of both Rocco’s interrogations and the drug-trade itself are revealed in their respective native forms. What emerges is a point of commonality impossible to illustrate through any other narrative form: both Rocco and Strike are exceedingly good at what they do, each approaching his respective survival with the utmost dedication to technical proficiency. For Strike, as we witness him trolling the neighborhood, we also understand the extent to which he has become an analyst of it: “two months from now,” he says with regard to a local girl, “no more baby fat…just another pipehead” (Price 3). With experience and insight, Strike thus navigates the eventualities of Dempsy with a kind of scientific precision, always ensuring that he remains cool, calm and collected by filling himself with vanilla Yoo-Hoo. Similarly, Rocco cares only “about dead people,” training his focus on the victims of the criminals for whose existence he lives. Indeed, when we first encounter Rocco, he seems bored with his existence, having mastered the challenges of crime detection.

Just like Rocco and his brother, Strike, Victor too is simply frustrated to the point of murder with his efforts toward escaping Dempsy by way of an honest existence. Having separately exposed us to each end of the Dempsy socio-criminal spectrum, thereby compelling the reader to instinctively think as Strike and Rocco do, Price all the more poignantly presents the reader with a comprehensive understanding of what “self-defense” means for Victor. As Rocco thinks to himself, “self-defense meant different things to different people,” so does the reader comprehend that for Victor, “self-defense” is a more literal concept (Price 582). For Victor, he is both impelled to shoot Daryl as a kind of badge of honor, relative to the hard-nosed community that he perceives himself as having somehow abandoned, and also to shoot Daryl because he represents the kind of corruption and squalor that threatens to somehow infect Victor, just as all of Dempsy is somehow afflicted with bone-deep illnesses. Victor’s confession thus emerges as symbolic of both the ambivalence with which Dempsy’s youth proceed and of the manner in which even those with honest prospects are thwarted in attempting to escape the concrete jungle.

Through a narrative structure that alternates between his protagonist’s respective viewpoints, Richard Price not only achieves the kind of taut dramatic tension necessary to drive his reader through the Clockers plot but also compels the reader to inhabit both sides of the sickness that plagues Dempsy. In so doing, Price evinces the motives of his characters as predicated upon dueling impulses of fight or flight and sink or swim; battles that are often fought as internally as they are fought externally. By placing the reader squarely and even-handedly within the context of Dempsy’s destructive symbiosis, Price exposes the reader to both ends of the problem: the hunters and the hunted, neither of whom could exist without the other. In exploring the obsessive illness with which Rocco and Strike pursue and consider their respective fates, Price provides unusually vivid and visceral insight into the ghetto-ization of urban American landscapes. In so doing, Price also speaks to the necessity of a well-examined life as means of avoiding the impediments of these landscapes; ones to which both the hunter and hunted become far too easily accustomed. As such, the alternative perspectives inherent in Price’s narrative apparatus is not merely a stylistic form of expression, but also a means of expressing a substantive dichotomy not of simply “good” or “bad,” but of the primordial choice between “life” and “death” from which no citizen of Dempsy can escape.

Work Cited

Price, Richard. Clockers. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Print.