No, I’ve lost
interest in characters such as this woman. I admit that I watched Breaking Bad
several times, and I still watch Better Call Saul. But for the most part I am
done with narcissism.
Narcissism?
Come on. Surely you
had noticed. It took me only one chapter. The protagonist, if that is who she
is, is a sociopath. Not only is she Paranoid. She is entirely absorbed within
herself and her own past. She has this dim, neurotic tendency to fixate on the
music in the car because she knows it from another time. Outside the car is the
entire world, but she sees not a single shred of wonder in it, nor can she
contribute any wonder TO it. Everything and everyone is either a nuisance or a
utility to her, if not both at the same time. She’s a nut. The moment that she
meets someone who shares her paranoia, what’s her instinct? To affirm? Negate?
Inform? Agree? Or STAB?! We KNOW that she is claustrophobic, anxious and quite
self-entitled to her plans. When she ponders something sharp, it’s typical of
people who would act out their anxiety with violence. One needs not to be
guilty of those tendencies in order that one might recognize them. She projects
meaning upon silence, she treats men with disdain, and she EXPECTS THE WORLD TO
ADMIRE HER. When she takes the path across the highway, and she has to hoist
herself over a fence, she has this sick fantasy that she’s being watched, not
for her safety but for their amusement, like she is performing a striptease,
and she then GLORIFIES the fact that it’s ungenerous, as if that same attention
she so clearly feels entitled to, expecting it, can only serve her confidence
but not her auditors’ desires. She feigns apology for it within her fantasy as
if to demonstrate some sort of power. And she FETISHIZES HER OWN BODY. Christ.
She even sees part of herself as BEING AN ATTRACTIVE FEATURE. Who DOES that?
How can she KNOW? It’s just a BODY. SHE could not know that. And if we are
forced to objectify her to assess the credibility of her delusions, it would
only be so that we might escape the entrapment of her disjointed subjectivity.
She fears the World because she feels it owes her something but wants something
in exchange. Where others have a conscience, she is paranoid of meeting debtors
on the streets. Perhaps that’s why one of her ears is characterized as
deformed: she only listens to the half of it. Sure: maybe the asymmetry of her
otherwise comely face is a foreshadow for the themes that follow. But outside
this intimation, it’s apparent that the imminent significance is in her
deafness to the World. Believe me: I would recognize the kind. It’s not that
things all go in one ear and then out the other, but that they go in only one
ear and stay stuck, festering into an awful picture. She’s precisely the sort
of delusional maniac who would kill out of a self-entitled fantasy that turns
into Caesarian madness. This is not a woman; this is hardly a person.
Thankfully only a fraction of the population is this way, and novels such as
these expose that fraction’s weaknesses, to that extent which writers can begin
to fathom them. And do not get me started on this schizophrenic tendency to
feel one’s self to be a victim for having a given name. Who possibly could
CARE? It’s just a name. NO one in one’s right mind would think otherwise.
Dm.A.A.