When I got to the end of the book, I sat for about 5 minutes trying to figure out how Gould knew Sid Hammet and Mr. Hung and the Conga and everybody else. The transition that starts in the second paragraph on page 402 really threw me for a loop. Now all of a sudden Gould is the leafy sea dragon from the beginning that apparently has all of these intelligent and poetic thoughts, but lacks the ability to talk. My theory was that Sid Hammet has become so engrossed with this story that he truly believes that he is Gould. It goes back to the very beginning when he was questioning his own identity (pg 32). He was looking for some type of purpose in life, and I think recreating this book consumed him. The ending comes full circle and references the last paragraph on page 38 in which Hammet is looking at the leafy sea dragon and getting lost in its gaze.
When I went back and reread page 38, I realized that maybe this was the point at which Hammet "became" Gould. I think this transition occurs during the line "[he] was looking out at the bedraggled man staring in at [him], that man who would, [I] now had the vanity of hoping, finally tell my story," and we didn't really realize it at the time because it was so early on in the story. The writing here seemed kinda confusing and ambiguous to me at first, but it kinda makes more sense now that I have finished the book.
I was feeling semi-confident in my theory until I read the very last page where we learn that most of the main characters are supposedly Gould's aliases; it was at this point that I closed the book and went to work on another homework assignment. Until I think about it for a few more days and try to make sense of it all, I'm just gonna say that everyone is insane and leave it at that.
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