Different Editions
In February 2003 Eggers and McSweeney's published Sacrament, a retitled hardcover edition of You Shall Know Our Velocity that included a new 49-page section inserted into the middle of the story. The U.S. trade-paperback edition of You Shall Know Our Velocity! (with an exclamation point added to the title), released later that year by Vintage, includes this new material. The addition, narrated by Hand, calls into question the reliability of the narrator, and, depending on which version is read, You Shall Know Our Velocity can be viewed as two different stories. In Hand's version, their third friend, Jack, never actually existed. Instead, he is a metaphorical representation of Will's mother, a device he used to cope with the loss that apparently occurred several years before the trip (rather than alive and in contact with Will as in his version). Hand also corrects one of the most startling scenes in Will's version, in which he breaks down emotionally, claiming that Will was too shy to do such a thing. Hand does say that the Will's version was 85% true, though he did hate the title, renaming it "Sacrament."
The original version was narrated entirely by Will. In the world of the revised version, Will's memoirs were published six years earlier, and Hand has taken it upon himself to insert his own perspective immediately after the climax of the story. Hand's meta-narrative is entirely self-contained, and it is as much a personal digression as it is a relevant critique of the story as presented by Will.
For the hardcover version of You Shall Know Our Velocity, the opening paragraph of the novel was printed directly on the front cover. In Sacrament, Hand alludes to the opening paragraph being written by a ghostwriter.
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Famous quotes containing the word editions:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)