Response to Selzer's "The Knife"

I love Selzer’s language in “The Knife.” Vivid and concrete, I could see each body part. I hold the knife in my hand. I am the surgeon. 

Selzer kept layering the metaphors for the knife, creating a complicated picture of his vocation. I think vocation is an appropriate word, considering he confesses “that the priestliness of [his] profession has ever been impressed on “him” by the vows, “taken with all solemnity” (709). He remembers visiting the hospital where his father worked and where he began to feel drawn to such a place.

The images of the knife contradict but somehow don’t compete. They create a full picture of what it is like to be a surgeon, to wield (or almost be wielded by) the knife—an instrument of great power. The knife can be dangerous but yet is necessary for the “priest’s” work. The knife leads Selzer on a dangerous journey or down a page of poetry or through a communion-like experience.

I was greatly amused by the ant part. At first, I thought the ant might be a metaphor for a distraction, but it turned out to be a literal ant. While humorous, the section ends with meaningful implied and explicit questions like, “Is our reverence for life in question?” (712). Although he refers to a literal ant, Selzer also makes the ant a symbol for disease. “He is disease—that for whose destruction we have gathered,” he writes (712). I thought the humorous and yet serious situation of finding an ant a potent image, communicative of Selzer’s whole experience of being a surgeon.