comment on style / language

The magician describes the virtual reality simulation as an illusion created by language. This offers a moment of metafictional reflexivity, in which the text of the novel is itself creating a simulation of a world. The power of language to create the appearance or illusion of reality makes possible one of the pleasures of reading fiction. The argument of the novel is also Derridian, in that the there is nothing outside the text. That is, the virtual world and the real world are both created by the mediation of language in the world. In as far as language, through texts, determines perceptions, then the real world is itself also a virtual simulation mediated by language. While the novel itself offers a virtual simulation of another world through text, the real world itself is also mediated through language, therefore as malleable and influential as a text.