Divided into seven parts, Dhalgren is composed of social chat, fragments, parodies, lectures, sermons, newspaper stories, and essayistic interior monologues, embedded in a minutely descriptive, painstaking narrative. Beginning in the middle of a sentence, the novel opens on an encounter in which the protagonist is accoutered in a chain of prisms, mirrors, and lenses, symbolic of the art of the novel, by a woman who changes into a tree; "the Daphne bit," as Kid calls it, will not account for the novel, however. In the last part it dissolves into an ostensibly objective transcript of a journal, edited by a cautious hand, containing materials which may or may not form the preliminary notes of the novel proper, ending in fragments which seem to return to the beginning of the novel. In addition, thirty-three scraps of the last part, inclusive of its editor's comments, seem to have an indeterminate...