Invariant Properties

In my copious free time I’ve read Dhalgren once and am midway through reading it a second time. I have three observations that seem important but I haven’t seen mentioned in the discussions at the top dozen Google responses. I don’t think it’s something that techies in particular would notice but that’s an interesting question for later.

Each chapter has its own voice.

This should not be surprising since Newboy commented that the notebook has at least four “hands” and there’s the ongoing question of whether the notebook is the novel. The presence of different voices might only be obvious once you’re rereading the novel. The voices color or reflect (or both) the chapter itself, esp. the fourth chapter.

Newboy also observed that one poem is actually a dialogue between two voices. He had missed that on first reading but it was obvious when he read it aloud. I don’t think this refers to the final chapter since that’s too obvious. I’ll come back to this point.

It’s important to keep a notebook.

You do not need a notebook to read the first half of the novel, at least not the first time you read it. But as you progress it’s increasingly important to keep one. Today that means a personal wiki, scrivener, or even MS OneNote, anything with the ability to create links between pages. You now have a framework for rereading the novel – minor characters like the “blond Spanish man” stand out once you start jotting down a note every time they appear.

It’s hard to imagine the author being much more explicit about this – the final chapter has large quotes from the notebook.

As an aside the author said the novel can be read started at multiple points and read by looping from the final chapter to the first. The idea of starting a notebook in the final chapters and rereading the first chapters as though they were new material is not a big jump.

The reader is part of the story.

Some people have suggested that the characters know they are in the novel. Nobody (in my quick Google search) noticed that the reader is also part of the novel. There’s a notebook within the novel that contains passages from the novel and we need to keep our own notebooks that contain passages from the novel.

I have to wonder if this is what Newboy foreshadowed with his comment about one poem being a dialogue. The novel (poem) is a dialogue between the author and the reader mediated by their respective notebooks.

Bonus: Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

One minor and humorous point: even the casual reader will notice the countless lions in the novel. (The park, the figurines in the Richards’ apartment, the lamp stolen from the department store, the sculpture in the girl’s house, more.) So why does the bartender have a tattoo of a leopard on his forearm? Did I misread it? Is there some deeper significance? I find it hard to believe that this author chose the wrong word.