Blight by Stuart Dybek
"Blight" by Stuart Dybek is a coming-of-age story centered on four teenage friends—Ziggy, Pepper, Deejo, and Dave—growing up in the unnamed streets of Southside Chicago. As they navigate a neighborhood marked by decay and hardship, the concept of "blight" becomes a significant part of their identity, influencing their music and outlook on life. The story explores the intersection of urban reality and imaginative invention, presenting a vivid and textured portrayal of their environment—one that is both gritty and laced with a sense of beauty hidden beneath the surface.
Set between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the narrative captures the characters' shift from innocence to experience, reflecting their evolving perceptions of heroism and adulthood. Each character ultimately chooses a different path, revealing diverse responses to their circumstances: from military service to artistic expression and spiritual exploration. The narrative also highlights the passage of time, as Dave returns to his old neighborhood, now transformed, and experiences a bittersweet blend of nostalgia and newfound recognition of beauty in what was once deemed blight. Through its rich imagery and multi-faceted characters, "Blight" invites readers to reflect on themes of identity, community, and the interplay between memory and place.
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Blight by Stuart Dybek
First published: 1985
Type of plot: Social realism
Time of work: The mid-1950's through the late 1960's
Locale: Chicago
Principal Characters:
Dave , the narratorZiggy Zilinsky , ,Stanley "Pepper" Rosado , andJoey "Deejo" DeCampo , his friends
The Story
This is a story of four teenage friends who come of age on the streets of southside Chicago. In a neighborhood whose streets have no names, they search for something with which to ally themselves, a place to claim as their own.
Blight is everywhere; they appropriate the word into their vocabulary so that it—the word "blight" itself—becomes the definitive influence on their world. When their neighborhood is proclaimed an Official Blight Area, they change the name of their band from the No Names to the Blighters. Baptized in the good name of blight, the Blighters know firsthand the beauty buried underneath the buildings boarded up and blackened by arson, with bulldozers waiting in the wake. Blight is a state of mind, a level of consciousness and perception, and the Blighters—Ziggy, Pepper, Deejo, and Dave—have heard "the music of viaducts"; they have been to "churches where saints winked."
A series of anecdotal digressions weaves an interrelated mosaic of visual impressions that all rise out of a shared sense of place: a Chicago that owes more to invention and the imagination than it does to the restrictions of a realistically detailed map. The narrative focus shifts from character to character, offering glimpses that range from the magically fantastic to gritty urban realism. Between two mid-century wars—Korea and Vietnam—the Blighters begin to see the world in a new light: a movement from innocence to experience. Early in the narrative, the Blighters consider the men returning from fighting in Korea as "our heroes." Eventually, the Blighters go their separate ways. Ziggy decides to become a Trappist monk and hitchhikes to the monastery down in Gethsemane, Kentucky. Pepper joins the Marines after his pregnant girlfriend, Linda Molina, moves to Texas to live with relatives. Deejo grows his beard and hair long and enjoys some local musical notoriety by recording a record that he persuades several southside bartenders to put in their jukeboxes. Dave, the narrator, eludes the military draft by hiding out in college, where he is thrust back into the past when a professor reads Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Ode to a Skylark" (1820)—a poem that begins "Hail to thee, blithe spirit"—in a way that makes "blithe spirit" sound like "blight spirit." During the spring, Dave takes the El train back to the old neighborhood, "back to blight." He finds that the neighborhood is "mostly Mexican," but the bars still have their old names. In a world in which everything is at once familiar and strange, Dave has a moment of ecstasy, "as if I'd wandered into an Official Blithe Area," as if the blight of his childhood has been mythically transformed, by memory and forgetting, into a city of bliss.