“Go Ugly Early”: Fragmented Narrative and Bricolage as Interpretive Method

Abstract

This article presents findings from an ethnographic research project as well as a study of method that explores the meaning of the popular phrase “Go Ugly Early” as it is claimed and lived out by a group of males in a popular bar. Acknowledging that similar methods can accomplish some of the same results and effects, this piece is an example of writing as inquiry, layered account, impressionist/mixed genre tale, or hypertext. Through form and content, the author illustrates the political value of fragmented narrative as it disrupts the linear flow of argument, reveals disparate and disjunctive influences on the researcher’s process of sense making through the course of a study, and opens more spaces for multiplicity. Through fragmented segments of scholarly, fictional, research journal, and participant narratives, the article explores how these sources of information play and interweave in the interpretive sense-making process and the construction of a research report.