Wolfe, who creates a very different effect by avoiding such an authorial persona or voice, instead divides his fables of experience among a range of voices, some of which can be taken for the author himself while others represent fictionalized surrogates for our experience. The specific occasion for creating a fable of experience is Wolfe's desire to convey the difficulty, terror, and heroism of flying a jet fighter from the pitching, heaving deck of an aircraft carrier. He begins by presenting the experience from the viewpoint of an old hand, and then, as he so frequently does, he shifts this viewpoint and presents the scene from that of the newcomer, moving closer in several stages. In the first of these he presents the neophyte's reactions with third-person narration, after which he uses the first person as if he were the neophyte himself speaking. According to Wolfe's narrator, when the neophyte first steps onto the catwalk that leads to the flight deck, "right away the burglar alarm sounds in his central nervous system. Listen, Skipper! -- the integrity of the circuit has been violated somewhere." Looking over the railing of the catwalk he sees that it is a six-story drop to water that looks like steel, and meanwhile the horizon is heaving up and down. Clambering finally to the flight deck itself, the neophyte, whom Wolfe clearly intends to function as our surrogate for this terrifying experience, discovers that it has little resemblance to the enormous piece of gray geometry it had in the training film: "Geometry -- by God, man, this is a ... skillet! It heaves, it moves up and down underneath his feet, it pitches up, it pitches down." As the wind sweeps across this deck sixty feet above the sea, we realize that it has no railings to keep us from being swept overboard and that there is also "no way whatsoever to cry out to another living soul for a helping hand, because on top of everything else the newcomer realizes that his sense of hearing has been amputated entirely." The deck itself, on which people run about in odd costumes, strikes us with such a sensory overload that we can barely take it in, much less imagine performing some appointed function on it.

This is a skillet! -- a frying pan! -- a short-order grill! -- not gray but black, smeared with skid marks from one end to the other and glistening with pools of hydraulic fluid and the occasional jet-fuel slick, all of it still hot, sticky, greasy, runny, virulent from God knows what traumas -- still ablaze! -- consumed in detonations, explosions, flames, combustion, roars, shrieks, whines, blasts, cyclones, dust storms, horrible shudders, fracturing impacts, all of it taking place out on the very edge of control, if in fact it can be contained at all, which seems extremely doubtful, because the whole scorched skillet is still heaving up and down the horizon and little men ... are skittering about on the surface as if for their very lives (you've said it now!), clustering about twin-engine F-4 fighter planes likes bees about the queen, . . . and then running for cover as the two jet engines go into their shriek and a huge deflection plate rises up behind the plane because it is about to go into its explosion and quite enough gets blown . . . off this heaving grill as it is, and then they explode into full afterburner, 31,000 pounds of force, and a very storm of flames, heat, crazed winds,