Blackout: The Voice Of One Crying In The Wilderness

"...now who could that be, I suggest, but Big George, and who could he be but pure electrical consciousness itself, insinuating itself everywhere, drifting in and out of all stories and machines [....] Of course it is in the nature of electricity to flow round and round and back and forth, even against itself sometimes, and short itself out under disadventageous circumstances."

-The anonymous cry of an interrupting narrator in the electric wilderness

Big George is aptly the chief narrator of the first part of Vollmann's You Bright and Risen Angels: "The History of Electricity." Here (above) is a fine example of the authour's erudite storytelling. The dissident voice, a projection of the author ("The damned keyboard stops for a second, and I have a chance to input now in spite of a pounding headache and a feeling that it is a waste of time to beat Big George...") into the narrative, hijacks the authorial "electrical" narrative flow of Big George. This blackout of an electrical grid, as people in Ontario will recognize, in Big George's third-person storytelling, embodied by the narrative interruption, jarringly makes his reader aware of a number of realizations or levels of meaning:

(a) Big George revealed prior to this chapter that he is a product, or former member, of the Society of Daniel.
(b) Big George is the embodiment, or voice, of electricity, according to the intervening, second narrator.
(c) The Society of Daniel's ideals spread and brought the world closer to the American (Tribal) Dream with the technological imperialism of electricity.
(d) The Society of Daniel unleashed the Ideals and still manipulates, behind the scenes, electricity universally.
(e) Electricity is at odds with the mechanical technology of the typewriter (or keyboard)

Therefore a blackout reveals:

(e) Big George is a poster-child of electricity and its effects, in words, life and imagination, and is different from the author's persona, as well as typewriter and its technological effects upon words, life and imagination.
(f) The Society of Daniel and its members are at the centre of a conspiracy for worldwide domination and capitalization.
(g) Big George's narrative is representative of an "electrical" hegemonic voice, history and storytelling.
(h) The reader should be wary of the Society of Daniel and its plans for globalization.
(i) Electricity is not necessarily a positive thing: (1) because it short-circuits and (2) gives the Society of Daniel the means to effect a worldwide Apocalypse (violence as a means to the rapturous end) ala Revelation.
(j) The Global Village is divided in civil war: (Human) Electricity vs. (Natural) Tribalism.