The sixth chapter sits roughly in the middle of Brief Lives, and it is suffused with a kind of mid-life melancholy. Or perhaps not melancholy exactly, but rather pensive yearning and contemplative reflection. Reconciliations and reconfigurations. The characters’ histories are long and a bit dusty, and many seem now on the verge of significant change, though no-one knows what that change will be. Everyone knows their stories must go somewhere, but there are nearly infinite wheres out there.
The chapter is composed of short dialogues: Destruction and Barnabas, Delirium and Dream, Dream and Pharamond, Dream and Bast, Lucien and Mervyn, Dream and Death, Dream and Delirium. Two of the longest breaks in this pattern occur on page 9, where Dream is alone, and on page 17, when Dream, Lucien, and Mervyn talk together (the trio is prominent only in the fifth and sixth panels).
The two-character structure is an ancient one — Aristotle...
The chapter is composed of short dialogues: Destruction and Barnabas, Delirium and Dream, Dream and Pharamond, Dream and Bast, Lucien and Mervyn, Dream and Death, Dream and Delirium. Two of the longest breaks in this pattern occur on page 9, where Dream is alone, and on page 17, when Dream, Lucien, and Mervyn talk together (the trio is prominent only in the fifth and sixth panels).
The two-character structure is an ancient one — Aristotle...
- 8/9/2011
- by Matthew Cheney
- Boomtron
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