... John Banville enjoys Michael Frayn's lesson on the appeal of uncertainty. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I do this strange: "... there is no essential self, a fact attested to surely by the incoherence of our dreams. What during the day we think we are falls apart at night; the singularity we imagine ourselves to be shatters into shards. The sleeping mind desperately seeks to reassert the semblance of order which during waking hours our will imposes on experience, with the result that we find ourselves, with imperturbable logic, flying trouserless over Buckingham Palace where the Queen can clearly be seen playing croquet and using a flamingo for a mallet."
Maybe this is true for John Banville. But I, deeply shallow as I am, rarely dream - or rarely remember dreaming. Moreover, in such dreams as I remember I seem to reognize the same person I take myself to be while awake.
Jerry Fodor's Who ate the salted peanuts? takes a less sypathetic view of Frayn's book. I'll cast my lot with Banville.
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