Ad Man

The story “Jon,” the first one in Saunders’ collection, seemed like the weirdest story out of everything we had read up to that point. “Insanely inventive,” a quote from a New York Times book review on the front cover, is a good way to describe it. Jon, or Randy, works in this TV ad evaluation place,  and he is programmed so that his mind is taken up by every commercial he has ever seen. The main point I wanted to make is that I think he makes the right choice when he decides to go “Out” of this life and become a common person once again, but first I want to go back to a few of my favorite ads that are imprinted in his mind.

When Jon describes making love for the first time, he makes an elaborate comparison to Honey Grahams: “the stream of milk and the stream of honey enjoin to make that river of sweet-tasting goodness, […] they just become one fluid, this like honey/milk combo” (Saunders 26).

There is one meaningful moment when Carolyn is looking at Jon for a long time, anxious and worried for what is going to become of him, and the first thing that comes ­­to Jon’s mind is an ad about a Claymation chicken that gets crushed.

When Jon remembers his experience as a kid with fishing, he remembers an ad about Jesus making fish and loafs of bread. I loved this line: “…and then that one dude goes, Lord, this bread is dry, can you not summon up some ButterSub?”

Much of Jon’s life is made up of the ads he sees. His emotions, his feelings, his experiences, everything seems to be based on some commercial on TV. It often makes his narration funny and makes it easy for Jon to make a joke referencing some ad everyone around him is familiar with. There are some moments, however, when he would have been able to come up with more meaningful response and made a moment with Carolyn or another person more real if he didn’t speak in ads and had his own ideas and his own voice.

I think in the end Jon makes the right decision when he chooses to follow Carolyn and get the chip taken out of his neck. They’ll both talk nonsense at first but I have hope that the old lady was telling the truth and after a year or two they would be able to become normal people. They’ll still be able to reference commercials and have their private jokes, but their minds wouldn’t be taken over by these ads, and they would be able to have their own feelings and tell each other things they themselves believe in, rather than what they were preached in LI 6832934857.