"...everything I do now is leading me to one of three possible futures: to the woman, to solitude (or to the living death in which I spent the past few years, as impossibility now that I have seen the woman), or to a horrible sentence. Which one will it be? Time alone will tell. But still I know that writing this diary can perhaps provide the answer; it may even help produce the right future." (32)
The flaw of finding this island alone it that all interactions are based on a monologue of the narrator. Never once has the 1924 party addressed him as anything but a ghost. He will forever be a ghost to them. His interaction and his validity of his immortality is dependent on fresh eyes coming in to see the recording. Even with the narrators careful action and scene setting with Fauastine-he is still untrue to himself. The only persons he can fool of his shared intimacy with Faustine is another who stumbles upon the island and is a primary resource to the recordings. The immortality is fabricated and false.
"I hope that, generally, we give the impression of being inseparable, or understanding each other so well that we have no need of speaking." (101)
Even at the very end, he is grasping onto something out of his reach. His eternity is counterfeit-and he knows it. Purpose of the diary is what then?
"And if I am to die, this diary will leave a record of the agony I suffered." (86)
...and suffers still.
"To the person who reads this diary and then invents a machine that can assemble and disjoined presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety."
The narrator's eternity is not complete yet. In waiting for his eternity with Faustine, he has broken his one vow.
"I must renounce-once and for all-any help from my fellow man" (20)
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4 comments:
So then hear at the end, it might be useful to see how the technology is what brings the fugitive back into a kind of ethical order, one which has one place a call on others. An idea like this is really interesting because it seems that by entering into the image realm he leaves an ethical realm.
However if we see a possibility for a different kind of ethics in not only each realm but in the encounters between both then we are presented with a big dilemma that raises the stakes for our thought.
He could have interacted and brought himself back to an ethical order without the recording of himself with the technology-he would not die from the machine in that pretend game.
That did not seem to be a worthy option. The technology provided a release and an escape at the same time. No longer in a conscious pergurtory and one step closer to Faustine.
But is it a realm w/o consciousness or is it merely a realm from which one cannot write into this one?
A repeating paradise, the same action, and dialogue; recorded thought-even the essences. No new sense of wonder. Thoughts will be repeating, if he were writing in his paradise, his dimension would allow the same piece of work weeks on end-
Key lies that he does not know he is repeating. A sense of new is freedom to him but predetermined and carefully planned out.
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