Indirect Representations of Thought: An Exercise in Narrative Ambiguity

I committed Akerlund to the asylum of the Corry Public Library; I even got him something not too demanding to read. It was of course a book on mythology—with a great many sensuous pictures of the gods in all their complete lack of concern for what was going on below. They were the gods humans wanted to be, the gods humans would be, with every base human nature and all of the divine. No contradiction just a kind of anti-climactic joining of the weak and the strong.

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A discovered poet who writes simply of what he sees is taken to be a master of irony and allegory:

There were long curtains of a brownish grey which made the passing motorists seem covered in gauze or a gauzy haze.

a. freq. attrib. The view made popular by [x] that all truth is obscured, veiled, and everything out of reach, gauzelike (read here: godlike); the ineffable world beyond the perceptual.

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There could be no saving the miserable pennies now, for the long or the short hours—all hours alike—were for the road. He’d gone far down along it, no reason why. With not so much as a goodbye Akerlund left his 11th story apt not intending to return. It was wet, and just of that morning chilly, on the walkway outside. Can there be a moment of decision? Can I decide? was in fact what he was thinking, without thinking the words that he knew followed and would force an immediate answer. What he wanted to know was whether he would continue along the walkway and to the airport, and so on until he was more or less comfortably settled into a new life abroad, without so much as a postcard sent to me, his shadow and constant tormentor. Or, on the other hand, and already this thought led to what it seemed to lead to, with automatic discursive facility: had this thought set a chain of events in motion that would lead him to turn back, to abort his plans? Was it enough—and this was a third question—just to think of a question, and, before the mind (Akerlund, that is) had even a second to consider its answer, the decision based on that very answer…no…that could be made clearer. He tried again: had he already decided pennies, pity, and the lot, to turn back? Not consciously—he hadn’t even finished posing the question to himself when he felt with a certain degree of certainty that he’d already begun to act on its answer. The answer, the question, these were formalities, diversions, redundancies. Was it just this one particularly wet moment on a newly chilled day that was unique? The cats darting behind the green trash cans seemed to know even this titanic puzzler. The answer wasn’t so much in their dashing, or their cork-screwed tails, as in their pig-like squealing. South America, Akerlund thought, warm weather. The easy life. He opened the door to his apartment, quickly; no one had noticed he’d left. It was eight minutes past the hour, the long one.