1Q84: Review of Chapter One.

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.