Love, Lust, and Anxiety Theme Analysis

And so the Other Reader makes her happy entrance into your field of vision, Reader, or, rather, into the field of your attention; or, rather, you have entered a magnetic field from whose attraction you cannot escape. Don’t waste time, then, you have a good excuse to strike up a conversation, a common ground, just think a moment, you can show off your vast and various reading, go ahead, what are you waiting for?

Mr. Kauderer shook his head but didn’t look her in the face. “He isn’t a Kauderer! We’re the ones who are in danger, always!”

I sensed at once that in the perfect order of the universe a breach had opened, an irreparable rent.

Jojo meanwhile was falling on top of us, but she was careful to push him aside, her face only inches from the face of the dead man, who looked at her with the whites of his widened eyes.

It was a mistake to invite her: this was during my first days of teaching, they did not yet know the sort I am here, she could misunderstand my intentions, that misunderstanding in fact took place, an unpleasant misunderstanding, even now very hard to clarify because she has that ironic way of looking at me, and I am unable to address a word to her without stammering, the other girls also look at me with an ironic smile.

This book so far has been careful to leave open to the Reader who is reading the possibility of identifying himself with the Reader who is read: this is why he was not given a name, which would automatically have made him the equivalent of a Third Person, of a character (whereas to you, as Third Person, a name had to be given, Ludmilla), and so he has been kept a pronoun, in the abstract condition of pronouns, suitable for any attribute and any action. Let us see, Other Reader, if the book can succeed in drawing a true portrait of you, beginning with the frame and enclosing you from every side, establishing the outlines of your form.

Maybe this is why I need mirrors to think: I cannot concentrate except in the presence of reflected images, as if my soul needed a model to imitate every time it wanted to employ its speculative capacity.

But the triumph of the water lilies’ capture upset the order of our movements, and so my right arm closed over a void, whereas my left hand, which had abandoned its hold on the shoot, fell back and encountered the lap of Madame Miyagi, who seemed prepared to receive it and almost hold it, with a yielding start which was communicated to my whole person. At this moment something was determined that later had incalculable consequences, as I will recount in time.

“What gave you the right, Nacho Zamora, to lay your hands on my sister?” he says, and a blade gleams in his right hand.

On the ground that separates me from Franziska I see some fissures open, some furrows, crevasses; at each moment one of my feet is about to be caught in a pitfall: these interstices widen, soon a chasm will yawn between me and Franziska, an abyss!

The seventh reader interrupts you: “Do you believe that every story must have a beginning and an end? In ancient times a story could end only in two ways: having passed all the tests, the hero and the heroine married, or else they died. The ultimate meaning to which all stories refer has two faces: the continuity of life, the inevitability of death.”

You stop for a moment to reflect on these words. Then, in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla.

And you say, “Just a moment, I’ve almost finished If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino.”