In the following essay, Jones traces the diverse ways the conventions of detective fiction and biography converge in Coming through Slaughter, demonstrating the appropriation of both genres by Ondaatje's postmodern narrative strategies.

The protagonist of Coming Through Slaughter is Buddy Bolden, known chiefly to jazz aficionados as a pioneering musician in turn-of-the-century New Orleans. Bolden is a hazy, semi-mythological figure at the dawning of jazz—from the days before recordings or big money or national and international acceptance of Black music. (pp. 92-3) From these fragments and an acquaintanceship with New Orleans and its history, Ondaatje has fashioned a prose work (his first) that is part documentary, part fiction and ...

To his acknowledgments at the end of Coming Through Slaughter, Michael Ondaatje adds this final note: "While I have used real names and characters and historical situations I have also used more personal pieces of friends and fathers. There have been some date changes, some characters brought together, and some facts that have been expanded or polished to suit the truth of fiction." He indicates here the intricate mingling of fact, fiction, and personal reference through which he records and i...

Based on the life of Buddy Bolden, one of the originators of New Orleans jazz, ["Coming Through Slaughter"] jumbles actual history, interviews with old jazzmen, snatches of local color, fictional reconstruction, three "sonographs" of dolphin sounds, primitive poetry and pretentious writing. Bolden's eventual insanity is romanticized, as if he blew himself beyond coherence on his horn. "Coming Through Slaughter" is written in several voices, none of them is sa...