As I read through this novel, a theme has become apparent to me that many people are not fully satisfied with the world: "Things were rupturing and nothing held....Books were consistent, yet people were not....Life was inexplicable disorder. Nothing was as it was in a book" (251). Many of the characters in this book attempt to solve the mystery of the world and classify it in some way in order to make sense of it. The surgeon attempts to order the world scientifically, first using a book of fish and later chronicling the differences between the various shapes of different race's skulls in order to prove inferiority and superiority. The Commandant attemps to order his own private world on the island as a marvelous and New Europe, where everything is perfect. Jorgen Jorgensen attempts to order the world by his own invention, making up countless stories in order to create whatever reality he deemed fit. Yet, in all of these characters aspriations to make the world make sense to them, they are left miserable in the end, for thier attempts fail. The narrator talks about the Commandant in saying, "He began to see everywhere unsettling evidence that the Past is as much a Chaos as the Present, that there is no stratght line only infinite circles, like rings proceeding ever outward from a stone sinking in the water of Now." Clearly, the Commandant's technique of ordering the world is not working.
Our narrator presents a very different way of addressing the chaotic nature of the world. He seems to suggest that it is in all this classifying of people by their race, whether or not they are a convict, and many other criteria seems to be the reason for the craziness of this world. This is why he paints people as Fish, for in his mind we are all fish, just differnt types of fish based on our different personalites. Gould proclaims that every fish/person has some beauty about them as he says, " And when I finished the painting and looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature." We are all fish, whether we be black, white, or convict. If we simply accepted each others differences and realised that deep down we are essentially the same, Gould believes the world and its people would not seem so mysterious.
I don't think that Gould understands the world. He seems to be in the same boat as the commandant and the surgeon. However, the simple fact is that we don't know anything about Gould's real world, because he is an untrustworthy author. We know that gould's past and name is simply a dream of his, and that as a character, he knows too much. If he is editing the real world in such a manner, for whatever reason, the worldview he writes upon, and it's consistencies, is a fabrication of truth. From this fabrication, Gould writes and thinks, and if he is analyzing an ideal world, he is bringing no solution to the real world.
ReplyDeleteTo the reader, Gould's way of dealing with the real world may seem to work, because we can't see the real world through the ideal one of the writer. Gould is far too inconsistent for that. I don't think, though, that if Gould has to write such a crazy novel, with so many fictions, It means he's found any cohesiveness that works in the real world. I think all the order he has made up is also just a nightmare of insanity, much like the commandant.
If the commandant wrote the novel, it would probably be like this. All would make sense to him, but only because he lives in a dream.