Posted by joffre on 1/3/2009, 12:58:22, in reply to "In the Labyrinth"
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After putting so much effort into Jealousy, I decided I didn't feel like reading any more of this stuff right now, but I put similar effort into In the Labyrinth last year, so I think I can add to discussion from my notes. I'll read through them and post some of the thoughts and questions I had.
This novel is immediately disorienting. It's raining, no the sun is shining, no it's snowing. Is the narrator imagining something? What does the red curtain suggest? It seems the narrator is composing a story and having trouble concentrating. A bit later, I again wondered if the narrator were an author writing a story. Later, is someone trying to reconstruct events? Why? Then, are all these characters imagining each other? Are they all speculating about people they met briefly? Later, is this a novel about the reader trying to understand the story? Later, concerning the soldier, is he remembering? Are we in his mind as only his creator, author, narrator, or perhaps a reader, can be? At one point, I noticed some shifts in the tense of the verbs. I wondered why the tense shifted. There may have been instances of this which I failed to notice. The first one I did notice was around p. 209. A second soldier appears, and I wonder if there have always been two. A third soldier is mentioned; he is in the ward with a box for one of the other two. Shortly after that, I am completely disoriented; is that the point? Scenes are mentioned: the next scene, then come scenes. Come where? To someone's mind? The wounded soldier is dead. Which one? Who is the me of the last word? Is it the reader who has trouble distinguishing between the three soldiers?
There are a couple description in the book which, like the description of the knot in A's hair or the flight of the beetle in Jealousy, seem descriptive of the novel itself.
The soldier "decides to confine himself, out of caution, to a series of incoherent phrases without apparent connection, for the most part incomplete, and in any case quite obscure to his interlocutor..."(228).
One sentence seems really important to me, but perhaps I read too much into it.
"... the soldier who was also at Reichenfels... who had fought so gloriously. The important thing is to find him,..., to make him tell his story"(246).
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