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Chapter 7
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
The narrator feels that mirrors help him think, so he collects kaleidoscopes to help him make decisions. The narrator has been able to transform his collecting into a surprisingly profitable business. He is involved in many complicated business dealings and is afraid that his rivals will try to kidnap him.
The kaleidoscope is an apt metaphor for this novel as a whole, which contains several different fragments that all resemble each other. The narrator’s desire to consult kaleidoscopes to help with making decisions suggests that he likes to consider things in a disorderly manner from every angle.
Themes
To avoid being kidnapped, the narrator has five decoy Mercedes vehicles that resemble his own and sometimes exit the armored gate of his villa. He also fears that people like his wife, Elfrida, will find out about his extramarital relationship with a divorced woman named Lorna. Eventually, the narrator feels he hasn’t done enough to protect himself and begins staging false kidnappings to throw people off.
The narrator’s efforts to protect himself end up causing him more problems than they solve, particularly when he tries to avoid getting kidnapped by actually kidnapping himself first. This passage satirizes the paranoid attitudes that some governments use to justify oppression in order to “protect” their citizens.
Themes
The narrator finds a way to exploit his fake kidnappings by forming insurance companies. But one day, during a false kidnapping, the narrator gets unexpectedly taken back to his house and locked in a mirror room. He wonders if he’s somehow kidnapped himself. In the center of the mirror room, Lorna lies tied up. The narrator frees Lorna, but she gets angry and accuses him of tying her up.
Ultimately, the narrator’s own efforts to protect himself lead to him trapping himself instead. Fittingly, In a network of lines that enlace and In a network of lines that intersect end up having some strong similarities beyond their similar titles: both end with the narrator seeing a woman he knows tied up and the woman blaming him for it.
Themes
Elfrida comes into the mirror room and says she kidnapped the narrator for his own protection. But when Elfrida asks how to get out of the mirror room, the narrator doesn’t know. He loses track of what’s him and what’s just a reflection.
The narrator’s inability to tell himself apart from a reflection is a representation of how throughout the story he was unable to tell the difference between real danger and paranoia.
Themes
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