I like reading pieces written in the first person. It’s often like a guided tour through a story. But what I find interesting here is Hamsun’s twist. Narration usually helps the reader move through a story. The guidance provides context and explanation of an uncharted landscape. But what Hamsun does it not so much narrate a story but an existence. We are forced into HP’s (Hamsun’s protagonist’s) mind. In this landscape time doesn’t exist as we expect. There are vague references to it being Fall or it being around noon, or is it three, or maybe almost four. But that’s how the mind works. Dreams are that way. What seems to take hours or days to tell can happen during a cat nap.

It is disorienting and uncomfortable at times. But then it would be for any of us if we tried to follow our own lives by focusing simultaneously on every moment that our brain, body and spirit are experiencing. Trying to present the simultaneous within a linear construct can’t help but produce cacophony. And yet we continue on the journey with HP, experiencing the mundane and magical. By using the first person there is no effort to try to nudge us toward compassion for HP. He seems to fully engage his defeats, finding a perverse pleasure and seemingly illogical rationality in them.  Again he exists and moves solely along his own timeline.

When he describes the gnats that brace “their heels against a comma or an unevenness is the paper, and they intended to stay exactly where they were until they themselves decided it was the right time to go,” it was clearly a metaphor for his own life. He is clearly cognizant throughout that he has options and , while his choices may seem to be random, disjointed and illogical, they are his choices.  His one concession to absolute control is the invisible hand of God that keeps “an open eye on me, and taking care that my defeat proceed after the correct rules of the art, evenly and slowly, with no break in rhythm.”

With this invisible observer in place it seems to me that HP is seeking to create a perfect and perpetual state of limbo in which he is Schrodinger’s cat chasing himself around the box.