The first sentence of Larry McMurtry's novel, The Last Picture show, is: "Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town."
That comes so close to being a genre sentence! One little change, "Sometimes Sonny was the only human creature in the town," and now he's a lone survivor of a zombie apocalypse! Or change the emphasis a little, and Sonny is one human, surrounded by mythological creatures that only appear human....
But no, I've read the whole book, and McMurtry had intended no change from our consensual reality. The clue is in the words "felt like." A character can feel like the most fantastic metaphors and still inhabit mainstream literature.
With non-mainstream interpretations off the table, what does McMurtry's sentence contain?
We have a character, Sonny. We have the on again, off again time stamp, "sometimes." Sometimes doesn't tell us what the date is or suggest an hour or era. It means partly so, partly not.
We have a location: "in the town." Town means somewhere smaller than a city, and perhaps more relaxed. It is also not very specific.
Most of the sentence aims to tell us about Sonny's feelings: "he felt like he was the only human creature." By devoting the most words to Sonny's feelings, the sentence may be showing us that those feelings are the most important matter to the story.
It doesn't name Sonny's feeling. Instead, it tells us what that feeling is like, being "the only human creature." "Only" sounds lonely – humans don't do well alone for long periods. "Human creature" is strange. Most often, we consider humans and creatures as different categories. What does it mean to be a "human creature?" Maybe Sonny is made into an animal by his loneliness. Although Sonny is not a werewolf, that same set of metaphors, of animals inside and uncontrolled feelings, might be invoked by "human creature." Still, a creature is more small and hidden than a beast or animal. Sonny isn't empowered by being like a human creature. He's reduced.
Words carry great capes of meaning behind them. We can use them to create new worlds or to paint extra resonance into everyday scenes. With the words "only human creature," McMurtry begins to show us the interior of Sonny, whose exterior might be all we could see if we met him.
Graphic elements by Ken Silbert
Photo by Courtney Rose on Unsplash