The Fourth State of Matter

Content Warning: This analysis discusses gun violence and suicide.

Jo Ann Beard’s essay “The Fourth State of Matter” uses a braided structure to recount a personal history of her own sideline autobiographical experiences. By pursuing the strands of her braided essay, which consist of her aging collie, chaotic squirrels living in her house, her impending divorce from her husband, and her workplace relationships, Beard delays the central action and tension of the essay artfully.

The essay is written from the perspective of a first-person narrator and primarily in the present tense. There are small departures from this structure, which foreshadow and move the essay’s action forward. One such move involves the moments where Beard slips into Gang Lu’s consciousness, in which readers get insight into the brewing anger he holds for his colleagues and later experience the horrific play-by-play of the shooting from his perspective. Another involves the moment where Beard leaps forward in time to the aftermath of the shooting as she brings a friend of Robert Smith’s into the room where, readers will later learn, he died. Beard’s narration, or her perceived consciousness, moves in time around the tragic events that plagued her life.