The Celebrants

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of drug overdose, suicide, terminal illness, and nonconsensual sex.

“They stood around with a sort of stunned bemusement, the finality of Alec’s death yet to sink in. Alec would burst through the door at any moment, they were convinced of it—high on his signature trail mix, a blend of ecstasy, ketamine, and god knows what else (none of them were privy to this recipe—he was like Colonel Sanders that way) and make a grandiose proclamation like no two people have ever met, or that they only existed inside him. The invincibility of youth had been pierced that night, but the air had yet to fully escape.”

Steven Rowley employs long, parenthetical syntactical structure to reflect the process of attempting to process grief. As Alec’s friends attempt to process their feelings about his death, Rowley presents a detailed image of the potential reappearance his friends imagine. The choice of run-on sentence both delivers extensive characterizing details about Alec’s drug use and tendency to make philosophical proclamations and reflects the experience of denial in the face of grief.

“Whoever had chosen this paint color had grossly misfired. There were hundreds of shades to choose from, Jordan thought—Polar Bear, Whisper, Frost, Pure, Swiss, Dove, Cloud, Icicle, Mist, Paper Lace—and this was what the decorator went with? Something that reflects life’s stark impermanency back in your face in the gravest moment of one’s existence?”

Rowley employs vivid imagery to describe the shade of white paint used in the hospital waiting room. The image is comedic in that the names of the paint colors are trite in relation to the news of terminal illness Jordan has received. It also adheres to intense realism in its particular description of “shades” and the “stark” environment, reflecting Jordan’s confrontation with a grim reality.

“They, like every other living thing that drew breath, were already in the throes of dying, used cars losing value the moment they were driven off the lot. And yet here they were at a starting line, comically stretching cold muscles, waiting for the BANG of a starter pistol, not realizing they were twenty-two years into a race that had different finish lines for them all.”

Rowley creates a metaphor of life as a running race, with the finish line representing death. That this is in close proximity to another metaphor—of the human body as a car whose function and value is depreciating—reflects the fact that mortality is difficult to understand, especially for the youthful friends. Describing death through mixed metaphors represents the search to assign meaning to it.