Some First Sentences are Meaner to Their Mamas than Other First Sentences

On the last song on side two of what I believe was The Smiths' finest album, The Queen is Dead (though long may she live!), Morrissey made the obvious, but still amusing, observations that "some girls are bigger than others" and "some girls' mothers are bigger than other girl's mothers".  Here is the song, if you like, for your listening (dis)pleasure: "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others".   I believe the same obvious (hopefully amusing?) observation can be made of first sentences in certain iconic novels. 

Consider what is arguably the corpulent mother of all first sentences, from The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman ...

"I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me; had they duly considered how much depended upon what they were then doing; - that not only the production of a rational Being was concerned in it, but that possibly the happy formation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind; - and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even the fortunes of his whole house might take their turn from the humours and dispositions which were then uppermost: ---Had they duly weighed and considered all this, and proceeded accordingly, ---I am verily persuaded I should have made a quite different figure in the world from that in which the reader is likely to see me."

... contrasted with what amounts to maybe the preeminent anorexic mother of modern first sentences -- and an anorexic mother, I might add, who is probably in possession of a sordid cocaine habit and possibly child pornography to boot -- "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles".  Indeed people are afraid to merge on freeways, Mr. Ellis.  No doubt they are afraid to merge on more that just freeways with so many more psychos (American grown or otherwise) out there today than there were almost thirty years ago when Less Than Zero was published.

Thankfully, not all first sentences are mothers or, for that matter, heterosexual mothers, like Tristam Shandy's in-the-sack example above.  Because some first sentences are homosexual men, a la Earthly Powers': "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me," thanks to Anthony Burgess' progressive ethos of inclusivity regarding all sexual orientations among first sentences.

 cover by Hadyn Symons

Some first sentences are bigger than other first sentences when it comes to flat out unsettling (or flat out crazy!), such as 1984s "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen." Um.  Like.  WTF, Mr. Orwell?  Or that Franz Kafka first sentence in The Metamorphosis, where the stricken man awakes one day and discovers he's become a cockroach.  Some first sentences are more cuckoo than others!

cover by Loki-Luo

Worse, far worse, some first sentences are meaner to their mamas than other first sentences, no matter how big or diminutive they be.  "Mama died today."  Or so he says.  And yet this strange, The Stranger's Gregor Samsa, can't even remember (according to that awful, on the cusp of being matricidal, second sentence) whether his mama died today or the day before?  Is that any way for any narrator to be remembering their mama, Mr. Camus?!  My mama practically sacrificed her very life every day for me, and you made it so he can't even have the decency to remember the damn day she died?  

cover by Mina Bach

I'd planned on writing more about how some first sentences are bigger than other first sentences and so on, but I'm incensed now, Albert Camus mistreating that mama like that. When I began this post, I felt great, it was clearly the best of times, but now?  Now it's the worst of times!  Maybe I'll come back and finish up with more first sentences later, when I'm feeling better.  Or maybe, should somebody out there (is there anybody out there?) ever read this post about first sentences, they might leave a comment and mention some of their favorite first sentences too, no matter the sentence's size, sexual orientation, mama-meanness (or lack thereof).