Summary

The chapter reads:

(in Tourette dreams you shed your tics)

(or your tics shed you)

(and you go with them, astonished to leave yourself behind)

Analysis

It is clear this chapter is Lionel asleep. It recalls another ‘idiot’ narrator in American literature, Faulkner’s famous ‘My mother is a dead fish’ chapter from As I Lay Dying in its relative brevity, but says something different about the narrator. At first, it seems Lionel would be relieved to be relieved of his tics, but then the reader learns it is his self he is relieved of. His sleep, perhaps then, is nothing but tics. The chapter is ambiguous, as dreams tend to be, particularly those in the middle of taut novels.

Vocabulary

astonished, tics