Confessio Amantis, with ‘Explicit iste liber’, ‘Quam cinxere’, and ‘Quia unusquisque’.

London, s.xv, c. 1420–c. 1435 (on the evidence of the decoration).

Contents

1

(fols 1ra–180ra) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 342–VIII.3114*

Four leaves missing from the first quire (1, 2, 4 and 6), the first two with Prol. 1–341 (the MS begins at Prol. 342, at fol. 1ra, since missing leaves are not numbered), the fourth, following new fol. 1, with Prol. 529–688, and the sixth, following new fol. 2, with Prol. 842–I.85. Text equivalent to a leaf (VII.1644–1813) is missing between fols 141 and 142, although these are part of a complete quire, perhaps being copied page for page from a defective exemplar. In addition to leaves lost, leaves at front and back of the volume are damaged by damp with loss of text, and there is some damage from damp throughout. Present fol. 2 appears worse than fol. 1, having lost text at gutter on column a of recto and column b of verso.

Prologue (fol. 1ra) begins Prol. 342 due to missing leaves; Book I (fol. 3ra) would have begun on the missing folio between fols 2 and 3, verso, column a; Book II (fol. 21va); Book III (fol. 41rb); Book IV (fol. 56vb); Book V (fol. 77rb); Book VI (fol. 119rb); Book VII (fol. 132va); Book VIII (fol. 162vb). Note that folio numbers given here take no account for missing leaves, as explained above.

Text: Ib (Macaulay [ed.], Works, II.cxlvii). Macaulay examined the MS ‘slightly’ when it was in the possession of Quaritch and gave it sigil Q.

For further information about the following Latin and French addenda that Gower caused to be added to MSS of the Confessio, see Appendix III.

2

(fol. 180ra) ‘Explicit iste liber’

3

(fol. 180ra) ‘Quam cinxere’

Confessio Amantis, with Latin addenda

London, s.xv, first quarter

Contents

[1*]

(fol. 1ra–1vb) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 1–143, supplied by a later hand.

The first leaf, replacing a lost leaf, contains a copy of Prol. 1–143 in a hand of s.xvi/xvii, taken from Berthelette’s (first) edition of 1532 (as the s.xix note on fol. ir points out; see also Macaulay, [ed.], Works, II.cxxxix), with some modernization of spelling. As in Berthelette, the opening Latin verses are omitted and the gloss abbreviated, but those at Prol. 93 are present (the gloss with ‘secundo’ for ‘secundi’), carefully set out in the column. Catchwords on both recto and verso.

1

(fols 2ra–183vb) Confessio Amantis, Prol. 144–VIII.3114*

Prologue (fol. 2ra); Book I (fol. 7rb); Book II (fol. 26vb); Book III (fol. 46rb); Book IV (fol. 61rb); Book V (fol. 81va); Book VI (fol. 124rb); Book VII (fol. 137va); Book VIII (fol. 167ra).

Text: collated by Macaulay (sigil A): Ia. ‘The text is a very good one of the revised type’ (Macaulay [ed.], Works, II.cxxxix), though in Books VII and VIII there are fewer of the revised readings. The stint of the second scribe (fols 17r–80v) is column-for-column with MS Fairfax 3 (see Nicholson, ‘Gower’s Manuscript’, 76) and the spelling is near-identical, as Macaulay observed (II.cxxxix; see also Samuels and Smith, ‘The Language of Gower’). Neither is copied from the other, since Bodley omits passages in Fairfax and Fairfax is earlier than Bodley, and the conclusion must be that both are derived from a common exemplar in which Gower had been involved (Nicholson, ‘Gower’s Manuscript’, 83–84). The Bodmer MS and CUL, MS Mm.2.21, two other MSS with column-for-column copying, have close resemblances to Fairfax 3 and Bodley 902, respectively, but neither is derived from the other (Nicholson, ‘Gower’s Manuscript’, 76).

Based on a life story interview with Julius (22 September 2019)

My name is Julius and I am a pop artist and a song writer as well. I do pop-style music, rock, gospel, as well as country. I am a free-hearted person, social, and I love making new friends. I love people, and most of all I love LGBTIQ persons, because every time I see them, it’s like I meet my brothers. They feel the same way I do; we understand one another; we go through similar difficulties: it really touches my heart.

I identify as LGBTIQ. I am the ‘G’ – that is, gay. Actually, I am trans versatile: transgender and versatile. But I am gay. I am a refugee and fled from my country, because I didn’t have the freedom I deserve to have as a gay person and as a human as well. My country of origin is Uganda. I got into this ‘gayism’ situation. I found that my freedom was taken away from me. I wasn’t free. I was hiding my sexual orientation for a long time. For many years I did not want anyone to know who I am. I actually pretended like I am not gay but this put my life in a closet and it became so hard, very hard. So, my life reached a point of ‘enough is enough’. There were other problems I got through, but my orientation was the main issue that made me flee to Kenya. The people in my community were not okay with my sexual orientation. I won’t go so deep into it, because I’m not feeling comfortable sharing my testimony in detail, but it related to my sexual orientation.

I have been in Kenya three years and nine months now. I reached Kenya on the 28th of January 2016. I have found it very difficult. Kenyan citizens are so homophobic; they don’t want to be near us or give any assistance once they realise someone is gay, someone is a lesbian, LGBTIQ. We are finding this a difficult situation here in Kenya. It has made me relocate from one place to another; it makes me not even want to engage in love relationships. I would – but I fear being killed by citizens of Kenya and I fear being caught by the police and to get imprisoned. Kenya doesn’t accept gays.

The next novel I will discuss portrays assassination precisely in the way All the King’s Men avoids it—as a radical act in a game of empowerment and disempowerment in which every individual can attain the power that is usually perceived as reserved for a political class. In Philip K. Dick’s first novel Solar Lottery (1955), the society of six billion people on nine planets is governed by the random system of “Minimax” that determines by lottery who gets to rule as the so-called Quizmaster. Set in the twenty-third century, the plot unfolds around protagonist Ted Benteley, who, in the opening scene, has just been laid off from his bureaucratic job with one of the major corporations that hold immense power in this capitalistic society. Employment in this economy often means swearing a fealty oath that binds individuals to other persons or companies in a kind of indentured servitude, and this is how he signs on to work for Reese Verrick, the Quizmaster. Yet Verrick, surprisingly, is ousted from this office and replaced by Leon Cartwright, the leader of a religious sect. Verrick challenges Cartwright and tries to have him assassinated, which in this system of governance is a legitimate way of keeping the very powerful Quizmaster in check; in turn, the Quizmaster usually sets up defenses to protect himself and remain in office. Benteley is caught in this deadly battle but comes out literally on top as the new Quizmaster, though he is not randomly chosen at all.

In envisioning this system in which chance, power, and political violence are inextricably linked, the novel comments on its own cultural moment of Cold War conformism in which paranoia and agency panic afflict both individual and society as each increasingly distrusts the other, sometimes for very good reason. If All the King’s Men at best foreshadows this containment culture, then Solar Lottery is firmly embedded in and critically responds to it, and with this novel the genre of assassination fiction finally moves into the Cold War context in which it would thrive most prominently. While the role of each individual in the novel’s future society is determined by a classification system based on intellectual capabilities, the position of greatest power is assigned in a “great lottery”: each person has “one chance out of six billion” to be taken by a randomized twitch of a magnetic bottle to “the number One class-position” (SL 6) as Quizmaster.

More than thirty years after The Dead Zone, Stephen King revisited the assassination theme in his novel 11/22/63, which harks back in many ways to the earlier novel. Its protagonist Jacob “Jake” Epping can be considered a double of John Smith, only this time the main character narrates the story as a whole, so readers are bound to his perspective even more tightly than to Johnny’s. His situation is similar in that he has to decide whether or not to intervene personally into politics outside the electoral framework, but the circumstances of his intervention are even more complex. Al, the proprietor of a diner, shows Jacob a “fissure leading into the past” to September 9, 1958, and he asks Jacob to carry out a mission he cannot accomplish since he is dying of cancer. Jacob is offered a chance to travel back in time from 2011 and change the “watershed moment” (63 57) in twentieth-century American history—the assassination of John F. Kennedy—for the better. Jacob, as Al tells him, is not acting as an assassin but seeks to prevent an assassin from carrying out his plan:

However, Al may be overemphasizing the difference, since Jacob’s reflections about changing politics through an individual act are not unlike those of an assassin. He eventually even decides he must assassinate the assassin to change history and his own present, thinking of Oswald as his “target” (63 443). Jacob’s agency is framed in political and electoral terms in the novel, much like Johnny’s in The Dead Zone. Jacob’s initial conversations with Al, especially, show that his intervention in history is akin to changing the minds of the electorate. Defining the watershed moment in history in which a single act (such as shooting the president) has massive and unforeseeable consequences, Al adds:

Every election—from the most democratic to the most bogus—is an event in which a fundamental dichotomy of modernity presents itself in an immediate and condensed form: that between society and the individual. This duality is one of the broadest philosophical frameworks in which to understand the issue of political choice. A democratic election is based on the one-person-one-vote principle, and we expressly cast our votes as individuals; there is probably no better illustration of this individualism than the photos of ink-stained thumbs that are so eagerly published by Western media whenever a country holds its first democratic election. Politicians keep reminding citizens of the power they possess through their vote, and we are urged from all quarters to cast our ballot and thus participate in the democratic process.

At the same time, this emphasis on individual democratic responsibility is haunted by its opposite, the society in which these individuals find themselves, and also the mass in which they may disappear. After all, a single vote is just that, and in the polls and media representations of results every single vote seems like a drop in the ocean of percentages. Paradoxically, every election is therefore always a reminder of both the importance and the insignificance of that single vote, and by extension of the individual and their political beliefs. The individual vote both seems to make all the difference and no difference. (Democratic and nondemocratic elections could be distinguished along those lines; in the former, the individual may feel the insignificance of their vote, while in the latter they know it.) On the one hand, the individual seems to have immense political power in this vote, and they are wooed by politicians and their parties, yet on the other hand, the individual may believe that they only get to exert political power every few years, and only in an indirect way—especially in the US system where an electoral college elects the president, not the voter directly. (President Trump’s entirely unfounded allegations of fraud after he lost the 2020 election in both the popular vote and the electoral college only added a new and highly problematic aspect to this perceived powerlessness, as these insinuations dangerously suggested yet another dimension of insignificance with regard to individual votes: that they would not be counted if cast for the “wrong” candidate.)

All the novels discussed here have in common that they both question and affirm individual agency in society through a representation of an extra-electoral intervention into politics, although their positioning within the spectrum this suggests varies quite strongly. Even The Manchurian Candidate puts a heroic individual next to the utterly abulic protagonist, and the two mark the extremes of the self-directed and other-directed assassin. For all its complications, the trope of assassination, of voting with a bullet, is an exceptional site of the political imagination in which the conflict between individual and society is visible in a condensed form, an aesthetic laboratory in which experiments and fantasies are played out, tested, rejected, or asserted, and where they closely intertwine with related fantasies of masculinity, transgression, and other aspects. Remarkably, this also entails an imagination of the politics and ethics of fiction, the power of literature to intervene in society and politics, the individual text going against the grain (or with the flow) of its cultural context. Many of the main characters in the novels discussed here are (aspiring) writers: Jack Burden in All the King’s Men and Graham in The Parallax View are journalists; Oswald in Libra would like to be a writer of short stories about America; Hyacinth in The Princess Casamassima has literary ambitions; Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate writes a newspaper column; Jacob Epping in 11/22/63 writes a crime novel on the side; Felker in Big If is literally writing assassination plots for the Secret Service; Carter Allen Cash in The Good Father keeps a journal we get to read; and Jay in Checkpoint admits he gets “jittery when I try to write” (C 87). If they are not themselves writing, they—most notably John Smith in The Dead Zone—repeatedly compare themselves to literary figures in their struggle with agency. The imagination of the assassin, an individual changing the world or his or her society, thus parallels that of the writer, and one can read this as a metacommentary made by political novels on the politics of fiction. Like the agency of the assassin, the agency of the text is both affirmed and denied, oscillating between the two extremes of power without conclusively settling on one.

Jack London’s The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. could have been the novel that continues what James began to foster—namely, a fledgling genre—yet its peculiar publication history prevented it from playing such a role. I mainly include it here to show that James’s novel was not a solitary exception in the literary imagination of assassination in America at its time, and that the genre’s concerns and its modes of representation were not simply put on hold between The Princess Casamassima and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Instead, London’s abortive novel indicates that there is at least enough of a tacit continuity to challenge the notion that it took the context of the Cold War to genuinely establish the genre of assassination fiction and its parameters. Yet The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. should also not be understood as a robust intermediate step between James and Warren, since London “abandoned the novel in late June of 1910, claiming he did not know how logically to conclude it.” The novel was only published in 1963 when Robert L. Fish, who had just written his first novel as he embarked on a career as an author of crime fiction, completed London’s text, considering (but not always following) his notes. That, of course, was the year of the JFK assassination, yet this historical coincidence should not suggest that London’s novel can be read more productively in the context of 1963 rather than that of 1910. The bulk of the novel is thoroughly embedded in its cultural environment of the early twentieth century, and the ending aims to be consistent with it. If the conclusion, written by Fish, does hint at its own historical moment of production at all, then it betrays mostly its postwar context, but even such suggestions are very scarce. If the novel is responding to a presidential assassination at all, it is actually McKinley’s in 1901, as Donald Pease suggests in his 1994 introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel, but even this is only relevant as the reactions to the event provided “the socio-political backdrop” for what is happening in the narrative (Pease xxiii).

Don DeLillo’s Libra further intensifies this tendency to complicate the individuality of the assassin, and it also thoroughly undermines the notion of the agency of the subject. This subversion is such a fundamental aspect of the novel that it is routinely addressed in critical works. Michael James Rizza, for example, argues that the text “displaces agency from the individual characters onto outside forces, dispersing it beyond the characters themselves and thus keeping certainty elusive in the end” (172), and Magali Cornier Michael shows that it “simultaneously presents and subverts a humanist notion of the subject as centered, rational, self-determining” (148). Most notably, Timothy Melley devotes a substantial section of Empire of Conspiracy to “the challenges the assassination poses to [a liberal] model of individualism and agency” (136), so that his more general demonstration of agency panic in the postwar novel finds its perfect example in Libra. While Libra is also exemplary of assassination fiction and thus must not be omitted from a discussion of the genre, it is also exceptional in the canon I assembled for this purpose with regard to its scholarly assessment. Libra is the only novel analyzed here that has received considerable critical attention with a strong focus on questions of agency and subjectivity. My discussion of assassination as a violent, extra-electoral condensation of a more general conflict between individual and society can thus refer to and build on a much more substantial reading tradition than in the other cases of assassination fiction. Since my own reading for this particular purpose is in tune with this very convincing tradition rather than at odds with it, the following chapter will be more concise so as to strike a balance between going over familiar territory and doing justice to the relevance of Libra in the generic continuum.

Libra is a postmodernist historical novel that tells the story not only of Lee Harvey Oswald and the conspiracy he finds himself part of but also that of Nicholas Branch, “a retired senior analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency, hired on contract to write the secret history of the assassination of President Kennedy.” Oswald is thus at the same time the protagonist of the narrative as well as an object of study; for the reader, he is both an actor and a “patsy” (L 401), a character and a historical figure only accessible through text and image.

The characters in the next novel under consideration, Richard Condon’s thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1959), can only dream of the degree of agency portrayed in Solar Lottery. In Condon’s novel, the assassin is not even granted agency enough to have a sense of agency panic, since he is controlled by outside forces to such an extent that he does not even recognize it, and his violent intervention into politics by extra-electoral means occurs far beyond any individual choice. The Manchurian Candidate is in fact particularly extreme in its extinction of the personality of the unwitting assassin Sergeant Raymond Shaw. Shaw and his platoon, including his later antagonist Colonel Bennett Marco, are captured by Soviet forces during the Korean War, and they are taken to Manchuria to be brainwashed by the Chinese expert Yen Lo. They return to the United States believing that Shaw committed an act of heroism to save their lives, for which he is awarded the Medal of Honor. Years later, Marco’s mental conditioning wears off, and he begins to suspect that he and Shaw were brainwashed. His investigation takes him close to Shaw again, and he discovers that his former comrade is actually a sleeper agent ready to become an assassin for the KGB. While the Russians are in the background of the conspiracy, its main agent in the United States is actually Shaw’s mother Eleanor, who is married to Senator John Iselin. Her plan is to have Shaw shoot the presidential candidate at a party convention so that her husband can succeed him. Marco, however, manages to change Shaw’s conditioning, having him shoot Eleanor and Iselin before turning the gun on himself and committing suicide.

As even this brief plot summary suggests, The Manchurian Candidate is as much a novel of its time as Solar Lottery, a “true artifact of Cold War culture” (Menand) and the Red Scare, when American individualism was pitted against Soviet communism and when paranoia reigned supreme so that, in a painful destruction of the Emersonian ideal, one might not even trust oneself any longer. Yet the novel also thoroughly subverts the ideology of a good United States of America threatened by an evil Russia by presenting the corruption of the American political system by McCarthy-like demagogue Iselin and his wife. While he is merely a cynical politician, she is the real actor pulling various strings.

The novels at the center of the following two chapters are closely related to the concept of panic, although their author trades more precisely in fear. These are The Dead Zone (1979) and 11/22/63 (2011) by Stephen King. The pair could be considered his “assassination novels,” and the latter in many respects picks up on what the former did more than three decades earlier. Both address the notion of agency panic through individuals who, as protagonists or narrators, are not as ontologically unstable as Oswald in Libra, but who struggle with moral, epistemological, and cognitive doubts that also work to undermine their individuality as the basis of their actions. Both novels are rooted in King’s trademark genre of horror fiction, but they do not simply use an utter lack of agency to produce the effects of fear and terror in the reader—in this regard, The Manchurian Candidate and its mindless zombie of a protagonist is much more of a horror novel than either The Dead Zone or 11/22/63. Instead, King’s novels continue and expand the gothic tradition of Romanticism in which individuals are confronted with the irrational, the unspeakable, the supernatural, and the limits of their own rationality, reason, and morality.

The Dead Zone, especially, is a perfect example of the fictional assassin’s agency panic in the framework of the individual conscience in conflict with social conventions. Using a third-person omniscient narrator, the novel both presents a strong individual protagonist to readers while at the same time subverting the cognitive, epistemological, and ontological framework from which that protagonist derives his agency, willpower, and convictions. Readers are to follow him closely in his transformation from a citizen who is so normal he is actually called John Smith to an assassin, empathizing and identifying with him all the way, being invited to think of him as “Johnny.” I am convinced that The Dead Zone succeeds like no other text in American fiction in portraying this development and making the reader complicit in it, yet the novel also effectively transports the doubt that haunts its protagonist to the reader and makes it an irreducible aspect of its narrative. Tony Magistrale describes John Smith as one of King’s rather typical characters who “are all fiercely independent people, in possession of intrinsic and uncomplicated moral codes that remain consistent in the face of societal challenges” (“Regionalism” 82).

While the Cold War provided the broad framework in which assassination fiction flourished, as exemplified by Solar Lottery and The Manchurian Candidate, it was a singular event, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, that had the most lasting impact on the genre. Novels such as Loren Singer’s The Parallax View from 1970 show how its parameters shifted noticeably in the enduring aftermath of that event, but they also show how a sufficient number of continuities remained to justify the idea of a coherent genre. Yet despite its immense importance, the JFK assassination cannot be constructed as a simple watershed moment that would split the generic tradition neatly into a before and after. Like the novels written before this event, the ones written after it use assassination to raise the question of how individual and society relate to each other in democracy, but the answers they give to this question are different.

Reductively breaking this difference down to a few major shifts within the continuity of the larger generic framework, I venture that the JFK assassination had these notable effects: First, it has provided a common reference point for any fictional representation of assassination, and it is either used explicitly as a plot element or implicitly to draw on the global cultural memory of the event as it has been constructed by its immense media presence. Second, it has made assassination fiction more popular, as the impact of the event has led to an international proliferation of the motif in various media, reaching sizable audiences. Third, it has highlighted the aspect of conspiracy and especially conspiracy theory even more than the novels published before 1963. Fourth, it has reformulated the tension between individual and society much more strongly as a tension between the individual and the state, either introducing a third actor to further complicate the established binary or replacing society with the state as conceptual synonyms that both represent ways of controlling the individual, for better or worse. These major shifts indicate not so much a break with earlier assassination fiction as an intensification of certain aspects that were present but comparatively marginal in earlier texts, and in turn a marginalization of other aspects that were more central in earlier texts.

A similar dialectic of despair and empowerment to the one that is operative in Big If is the motivational force in Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint: A Novel. A modestly controversial publication in its time, Checkpoint is the text among those selected here that most immediately responds to its historical moment and political context, the presidency of George W. Bush and the unjust violence inflicted on and in various regions of the world after 9/11. The text is philosophically weighed down by this particularity, and it seems to trade aesthetics for politics without much of an interest in connecting the two, so that its relevance may lie more in its statement than in how it makes that statement. Yet at the same time the most interesting aspect about Checkpoint may well be its very inability or refusal to transcend its particular historical moment, going for a deliberate knee-jerk rawness that does not really care for consistency and thereby manages to convey (and question) an angry irrationality that many of the other texts treated here are lacking.

The novel takes the form of a dramatic dialogue, but without stage directions it is more of a philosophical dialogue in the Socratic tradition than a dramatic text that is meant to be produced. Its textual rather than dramatic nature is highlighted from the start when Jay and Ben, the two interlocutors, begin their conversation by testing their recording device, the narrative conceit being that readers are getting a transcript rather than witnessing anything directly. This results in a conflation of temporalities: while the conversation unfolds in the present tense, we are only reading it after the fact, and this leaves us wondering more about the consequences of their meeting (and about the reasons why the transcript might be available to us). The scene is set by the only external commentary in the text—“May 2004 / Adele Hotel and Suites / Washington, D.C.”—and other than that there are only parenthetical references to sounds on the tapes that are part of the transcription.

Without any narrative framework, Checkpoint focuses only on the voices of Ben and Jay. While their subjective perspectives, opinions, and ideologies are commented on by the respective other, they are not embedded in any broader context that would further elucidate them for the readers.

If The Princess Casamassima can be considered one particular beginning of the genre of the assassination novel and The Assassination Bureau, Ltd. an abortive supplement to it, then what it began took quite some time to actually become a noticeable presence in American literature. Another more productive beginning took place more than half a century later with the publication of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men in 1946. Often considered a classic novel on American politics, All the King’s Men presents the rise and eventual assassination of Governor Willie Stark in an unnamed Southern state in the 1930s. It is told from the perspective of first-person narrator Jack Burden, a former journalist and graduate student who becomes part of his inner circle. Yet the novel is not only a political one: the narrative expands beyond this immediate context and these two main protagonists to create a much more complex network of significance. The political is thus embedded in a larger framework that covers questions of ethics, causality, agency, responsibility, and guilt on a personal as well as a social level. However, the political is not merely incidental to this more expansive exploration of human action and reaction, but it is rather an ideal narrative catalyst for a consideration of the complex processes that govern the lives of individuals in society. As Joseph H. Lane Jr. puts it in his groundbreaking political reading of the novel:

In this abstract sense (but notably not in others), one may describe All the King’s Men “as the first significant American novel of the Cold War” (Humphries 172), since it

My final example of assassination fiction, Noah Hawley’s The Good Father, explores in depth the motif of assassination as a conflict of extraordinary subjectivities that is only hinted at in Checkpoint. The novel is formally remarkable for using a number of shifts in narrative perspective to consider a successful assassination from a variety of angles. Whereas some assassination novels, such as Stephen King’s The Dead Zone, employ a rather strict limitation of narrative perspective for their construction of a troubled individualism in conflict with society, The Good Father multiplies and blurs these subjective viewpoints without ever giving us what could be considered a complete picture. The assassination in question is the shooting of Democratic senator and presidential hopeful Jay Seagram during a campaign event in Los Angeles by twenty-year-old Daniel Allen, who also goes by the name of Carter Allen Cash. The novel opens with a brief and patchy report on his identity as it is pieced together by the media in the immediate aftermath, and as it is received and supplemented by the main first-person narrator in the novel, Daniel’s father Paul Allen. The novel inverts the usual structure of assassination fiction in that it opens with a successful assassination instead of leading up to one (or an attempt), and readers are not given any reason to doubt that Daniel has actually shot Seagram on stage. However, his motives remain entirely unclear, and his father has reason enough to give his estranged son the benefit of the doubt—against all odds—as he embarks on a quest to find out not so much why he did it but if he did it at all. The narrative structure thus takes readers from certainty to doubt and finally to a different certainty, as the text doubly challenges the agency and subjectivity of both Daniel and Paul, the perpetrator and the doctor-turned-detective who tries to reconstruct the events, their context, and Daniel’s personal motivation.

Paul serves as the main focalizer in the text, yet the narrative perspective is not at all clear-cut. First-person and third-person narration intertwine, and the limitations of Paul’s viewpoint are transcended by knowledge that cannot be entirely explained by his projections.