He found it in the third wall he examined and it may be valuable to state–as an indication of the growing acuteness of his reasoning powers–that he neglected investigating one of the walls as a result of a deduction to the effect that the door of a room in the upper storey of a house is rarely to be found in the same wall which contains the window. [50]
So . . . aside from exhibiting leaps of logic and powers of reasoning I wish many of my students had, I wonder what intuition told Furriskey he was in an upper storey of the house.
Another striking aspect of this whole “creation” scene is the mise en abyme effect of the created meeting his creator who has a creator who has a creator who has . . . etc., presuming there is a creator . . .
3 Comments
Anadiplosis is the repetition of the final words of a sentence or line at the beginning of the next. It took a few of these figures of speech markers for me to stop and, damnit, just go look it up and see if he is full of shite. Wouldn’t you know it, the one I look up is all about jerks and strains. (And, yes, I continued on and looked up litote and synecdoche; I am not unaware that my everyman license is in danger of being revoked.)
Intriguing notion . . . funny we never thought of it when we were younger and more immortal than we are now. I am still trying to catch up from an all-nighter some time in the 70s. And, thanks to Mother Navy and the sunless, nightless 18 hour “day” on submarines, I cannot sleep more than 6 hours in a single session unless I use prescripted assistance (and even then the magic 8, which turns back on itself, a single surface, is an ellusive number). But poor Trellis, he has no life, it seems, but the bed . . . and the book.
Consider the epigraph for ASTB:
Transliterated this is: existatai gar pant’ ap’ allêlôn dikha. Translated (thanks to Wikipedia) this is: for all things change, making way for each other.
These things always “bother” me. What are we to do with them? Are they some sort of clue as to the reading of the text? Or, are they merely something the author (or—worse—the editor) “liked,” and for which no explanation is offered? A case that has bothered me for some time is an epigraph used by Conrad for his collection of novellas called Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories:
Can you guess which tale? Even when you know, it is not clear why . . .
You’ll notice that (assuming it is “O’Brien” who put it there) there is no indication as to the source for the epigraph at the opening of ASTB. Again, Wikipedia (as far as we can trust its content) helps: it is apparently from Euripides play Heracles. I’m going to try to work out its context there to see if that sheds any light on its use . . .
If we assume that it is pertinent to the story, how is it so?