1st-Depersonalization Point of View—Bennett Sims (Note 1)

And because I depersonalize myself to the point of not having my name, I reply whenever someone says: I.

—Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.

1. Every Name In History Is I

When drafting my story ‘Portonaccio Sarcophagus,’ I hit a wall with the ending. The plot is that a man stares at a tomb. The narrator sits on a bench in the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome, studying the bas relief on the Portonaccio Sarcophagus. After twenty pages, the museum closes, and he rises from the bench to leave.

That’s the outward plot. Inwardly, what’s being plotted are the narrator’s thoughts, memories, and associations: everything that passes through his mind as he contemplates the sarcophagus. There were several formal decisions I had to make for this story, and each involved its own technical challenges. The narrator’s internal monologue is formatted as a block paragraph, after Thomas Bernhard, so there are no breaks to interrupt his thoughts. The story also reproduces photographs, after W.G. Sebald, so the text is in dialogue with different images. But the formal decision I ended up struggling with the most was, in some ways, the most basic: point of view. The story is in 1st-person, with no other characters for the narrator to interact with. All he does is sit alone on a bench and think. In other words, the story is a fiction of consciousness, dramatizing the movements of a mind, and at a certain point I sensed that the story needed to go beyond that mind, to peer around the narrator’s perspective somehow and access an outside. The place I attempted to accomplish this was the ending. This turned out to be hard. Before I describe the difficulties I encountered there, I’ll identify a few threads of the narrator’s thoughts, the motifs and patterns that were providing structure to the story, and which themselves needed to be resolved before the end. 

The first major thought thread concerns facelessness. The Portonaccio Sarcophagus features several faceless figures in its bas relief, including its intended tenant, a general named Pompilius. The faces of Pompilius and his family have all been left unfinished—their heads are just egglike smooth ovals of uncarved marble—and these faceless figures come to fascinate the narrator. Since Pompilius’s head lacks Pompilius’s face, it occurs to him, it is not strictly speaking a portrait of Pompilius at all. Any other face could be carved there, anyone else buried in his tomb. In this state of non- or pre-composition, the unfinished portrait head comes to seem like a premonition of Pompilius’s decomposition in the grave, and this identity-less-ness in death reminds the narrator of Nietzsche’s dementia in life, when he declared in a letter from Turin, ‘I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father, I venture to say that I am also Lesseps…I am also Chambige…every name in history is I.’ Just as every name in history could flicker across Nietzsche’s ‘I am,’ filling in its blank, the narrator pictures every face in history flickering across these blank heads. Pompilius’s posthumous facelessness also reminds him of other defaced figures in media: the pixelated pedestrians in Google Maps’ Street View; the blurry cursed photographs in the horror film The Ring; and, most significantly, a kind of cursed photograph of his mother, a vacation snapshot taken in an Italian cemetery, in the background of which a Grim Reaper silhouette has materialized, its face just a fog within its shadowed cowl (when his mother dies, he thinks, this photo will become—will have always been—an omen of her death).

All these digressions on facelessness and death lead the narrator to reflect on his mother’s own dementia, which becomes the story’s second major thought thread. Her memory loss has been making it harder for her to recognize faces. She’s begun to confuse the narrator’s sisters, for instance, and they’ve been updating him over FaceTime while he’s been in Rome. Recently a strange man rang their mother’s doorbell, claiming to be the narrator’s childhood friend; another stranger accosted her at an ATM to ‘remind’ her that she owed him a hundred dollars. The narrator tries to imagine what this must be like, for her. He imagines that his mother—like Pompilius, like the pedestrians in Street View—is living in an underworld of facelessness now. Whenever people come up to her, with blurry half-familiar features, their heads must remain smooth and blank until they’ve identified themselves, at which point counterfeited features must emerge from their faces as if from chiseled stone. At the end of the story, the narrator reveals that he’s flying home tomorrow to visit her, and he wonders whether she will recognize his own face. 

It’s probably clear from this plot synopsis that the story is what most readers would describe as plotless. But in my experience, fictions of consciousness don’t actually circumvent the structural demands of plot. All they do is internalize them, since consciousness itself can, of course, be plotted. Even in the most digressive texts, readers expect to understand how one thought leads to the next: how they create a clear sequence of cause and effect; how patterns come to evolve across their repetitions; and how this chain of associations ends up changing something for the character. Put simply, readers expect riffs—no less than rifles—to go off in the third act. My narrator had introduced half a dozen riffs: about Pompilius, facelessness, Nietzsche, memory loss, Google Maps, omens, elder fraud. So one question the ending had to suggest an answer to was how these disparate threads of contemplation might be culminated, escalated to some point of convergence or climax, and how they might come to make a difference—or, at least, make meaning—for the narrator. As a result of thinking all these thoughts in this order, on this day before this sarcophagus, what becomes possible for him? What new thought is he able to think on page twenty that he wouldn’t have been able to think on page one? 

I had understood the story to be about projection. The narrator is attempting to project himself inside his mother’s mind: he’s curious about the subjective texture of her memory loss, what it feels like for her. So one way to conclude the story, I considered, might be to consummate the narrator’s projection project, allowing him to imaginatively enter his mother’s perspective. Here’s how the story originally ended:

My sisters would be picking me up from the airport tomorrow, and our mother would be with them. I expected her still to recognize me. And if she didn’t? If she failed at first to recognize me in the terminal, at least I might know by the confusion in her eyes something of what she was seeing. It’s me, Mom. Don’t you remember? I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father. I venture to say I am also Pompilius, your son’s friend. Where’s that hundred you owe me?

I was never satisfied with this ending. I could tell that some crucial movement was missing—the story felt as unfinished as the sarcophagus—but I couldn’t see the way forward. Reading it now, I’m struck by how close it actually comes to the final version. For one thing, it does conclude on an act of projection: the narrator pictures himself through his mother’s eyes, as stripped of identity as Pompilius. There’s a second act of projection I find useful here, in the shift to future tense. The narrator imagines what it ‘would be’ like tomorrow. In general, tense shifts can be effective gestures of closure for stories. The reader senses that, now that the character has undergone some change of state, the story must undergo a formal change—entering a different temporality—to accommodate these new conditions of consciousness. Future tense is particularly effective, since it allows the story to go on ending beyond its ending: a virtual ending—an imagined aftermath—can vibrate beyond the horizon of the final line. The narrator may still be physically inside the museum, but he’s also already at the airport in his mind. Finally, there’s an act of projection implied in the Nietzsche refrain: ‘I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father. I venture to say I am also Pompilius, your son’s friend.’ Now the narrator is the one flickering across every name in history, or at least every name in his story. 

Still, the wrongness of this ending nagged at me. The story seemed to simply stop, rather than conclude. There were several thought threads left dangling (there’s no proper conclusion for the facelessness motif, for instance). Plus there’s that limp repetition of ‘recognize me…recognize me,’ and ‘Where’s that hundred you owe me?’ is bathetic as a final line (the narrator should end the story thinking about his mother, I felt, rather than her scammer). More broadly, I wondered whether these various acts of projection had actually gone far enough. Maybe the narrator needed to break with his point of view in a bolder way, for the reader to feel he had truly reached a new plane of thought. After months of stuckness, though, I couldn’t come up with anything better. I sent the story out, and it found a home at The Georgia Review, where I was lucky to work with Gerald Maa, a rigorous and perceptive editor who encouraged me to push the ending further. Wasn’t the story ‘essentially about face/time,’ he asked? He wondered whether the narrator might escalate these braided motifs of facelessness, forgetfulness, and distortion to some final insight. I sat with this question. I returned to two other stories featuring isolated narrators, who get caught in obsessive thought spirals, and who identify with the objects of their contemplation so completely that—ejecting from their own subjectivity—they become them.

2. In Spite Of You and Jane

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ is one of the most compact and ruthlessly patterned thought spirals I know. The plot is that a woman stares at a wall. Confined to bed, she studies her wallpaper until she begins to make out a ghostly woman trapped inside. She grows so obsessed with this specter that, eventually, she projects herself inside her, swapping identities, and the story ends at the very moment of her depersonalization. In a deft and devastating POV shift, the narrator (who I take to be Jane) cries out, ‘I’ve got out at last, in spite of you and Jane,’ abandoning her 1st-person for the wallpaper woman’s. How does a wall—how does a short story—destroy a mind in ten pages? When all a narrator is doing is lying in bed thinking, how does a story escalate those thoughts until it achieves escape velocity from her point of view?

When the story begins, we learn that the narrator is suffering from a vague ‘nervous condition,’ and that her physician husband is dismissive. He diagnoses her with ‘a slight hysterical tendency,’ prescribes strict bed rest, and moves their family to a summer house for her forced convalescence. Gilman is drawing from her own experience of the so-called rest cure. As treatment for her post-partum depression, the neurologist Weir Mitchell instructed her to ‘live as domestic a life as far as possible’ and ‘never to touch pen, brush, or pencil again.’ Gilman endured this tedium for three months before—as she put it—she ‘came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.’ ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’ intended as a cautionary tale, trespasses that borderline to report back what happens there. Like Gilman, the bedridden narrator is ‘absolutely forbidden to “work,”’ which for her means writing, so the story takes the form of a clandestine rest-cure diary. Her first entry, on the day they arrive, establishes the thought threads that the story will proceed to unravel: 

I would say a haunted house…John laughs at me, of course, but one expects that in marriage…John is a physician, and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper, and a great relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster. You see he does not believe I am sick! And what can one do? 

The reader begins tracking several habits of mind here: the narrator’s fixation on hauntedness; John’s clinical control and condescending laughter; her literary escapism. We understand early on that this will be a kind of feminist ghost story. The narrator will be haunted by something; her jolly doctor husband will disbelieve her; she will turn to dead paper to escape. But there’s also a habit of mind being established in her sentences themselves. We note her stylistic tendency to split off from 1st-person, distributing herself across hypothetical points of view. ‘One’ expects that in marriage, rather than ‘I’: this is the first of many times she’ll 3rd-personalize herself. When she writes, ‘You see…,’ she invokes a 2nd-person imagined reader; but diaries generally don’t have readers—she wouldn’t show this to a living soul—so the only ‘you’ she can be addressing is her future self. She soon shifts back to 3rd-person (‘what can one do?’), surveying her situation from an external point of view: 

If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one…what is one to do?...My brother is also a physician…and he says the same thing. Personally, I disagree with their ideas. Personally, I believe that congenial work…would do me good. But what is one to do?

On first read, the pendularity of her pronouns here—the way that she oscillates unstably between ‘I’ and ‘one’—probably strikes us, at most, as a rhetorical tic. But we can already hear clear tensions inside the tic, and they are tensions of the self: how she compulsively repeats ‘Personally, I. Personally, I,’ nervously reasserting the primacy of her personal 1st-person; how, nevertheless, she keeps reverting to 3rd-person (‘what is one to do?’), as if to practice rational detachment, or to adopt her husband’s objective medical perspective on herself. There’s even the slight implication that this 3rd-personalization—not yet to say depersonalization—might function as another mental escape mechanism, a technique (like the dead paper) for projecting her experience outward (all of this is happening not to ‘me’ but to ‘one’). The reader files these tics away as another potential trajectory for the narrative. In addition to being a feminist ghost story, this might be a horror story about the porosity of 1st-personhood: how a mind held under duress can dissociate into self and double, into ‘I’ and ‘you’ or ‘I’ and ‘one.’

Now that the story has established her habits of mind, it can begin bouncing her off the eponymous wall. The room that her husband has chosen for her bed rest is the house’s former nursery, with bars in the windows and rings in the walls. This setting recalls a prison and an insane asylum while also reminding the narrator of every thought she’s trying not to think. Soon we’ll learn that she’s a new mother, apparently suffering, like Gilman, from post-partum depression. Unable to be around her baby (‘it makes me so nervous’), she’s hired a nurse as a surrogate mother—her first double in the story—and she’s ashamed not to be doing her ‘duty.’ So the nursery is already a haunted space, and the site of that haunting is the wallpaper: 

The paint and paper look as if a boys’ school had used it. It is stripped off…all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach…I never saw a worse paper…when you follow the lame uncertain curves for a little distance they suddenly commit suicide—plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions…No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself if I had to live in this room long. 

We perk up at the phrase ‘as far as I can reach’: the wallpaper is not torn as far as ‘a child’ or ‘one’ could reach, but as far as the narrator, 1st-personally, can reach. Since it’s already matched to her anatomy, we understand that she’ll have to reach for it herself, before the story is over, just as the previous tenants did: they’ve left that track for her to travel (later she’ll find a literal track, a groove in the floor, which is also matched to her anatomy: her shoulder ‘just fits in that long smooch’). The narrator seems to anticipate this transformation: ‘No wonder the children hated it! I should hate it myself.’ In that toggling from ‘The children’ to ‘I,’ she plugs herself into their subject position, experiencing the transitive property as tragic destiny: ‘I’ and ‘the children’ may be different nouns, but they share the same verb, same hate, same room, same fate. Perhaps this is why she reverts to 2nd-person, preemptively projecting this possession onto somebody else: ‘when you follow the lame uncertain curves…they suddenly commit suicide…destroy themselves…’ We start to worry that she might commit literal suicide, so we may miss the metaphorical suicide—the symbolic destruction of self—that’s already being prefigured in that ‘you.’ Facing the wall for the first time, she resorts to the same dissociative escape mechanism she deploys in her marriage. The wallpaper is not just torn ‘as far as I can reach,’ then, but as far as her ‘I’ can reach: if John keeps her there, it will be the place where her ‘I’ divides into ‘you’ and ‘one.’ 

With that, we’ve reached the end of her first diary entry. The next picks up two weeks later, after the wallpaper has had time to pressurize her mind and accelerate her thought spiral. Across its twelve diary entries, the story’s procedure is to escalate her obsessions, so the reader is curious, in part, to see how the story will keep finding new ways to ratchet up its patterns. The most obvious patterns are the literal ones, the wallpaper designs, which escalate in grotesqueness. Every time she looks at them they’re differently disgusting, and much of the pleasure of the prose derives from her virtuosically revolted, proto-Lovecraftian descriptions, which draw on an eldritch repertoire of corpses, cursed geometry, and organic rot. The ‘uncertain curves’ from Entry One become, in Entry Two, ‘a broken neck and two bulbous eyes [that] stare at you’ (note: not ‘at me’). These mutate into ‘bloated curves,’ ‘waddling columns,’ ‘slanting waves of optic horror,’ ‘wallowing seaweeds,’ and worse. If these designs are a mirror of her disintegrating mind, the wallpaper woman is a mirror of her imprisoned body, and she undergoes a parallel series of metamorphoses. The narrator first notices her in Entry Two, where she’s merely a ‘formless sort of figure.’ Soon she’s ‘like a woman stooping down and creeping,’ and by Entry Five, the ‘faint figure…seemed to shake the pattern, just as if she wanted to get out.’ Two axes of escalation, then: while the designs grow more and more repulsive, this figure grows more and more legible as the narrator’s double.

Meanwhile, the narrator has been trying to escape from the room. For the story’s first half, she makes three requests to leave, and John denies her three times. It’s instructive to study how Gilman patterns these scenes, since they form their own precisely symmetrical series of escalations. For the narrator’s first request, John condescendingly dismisses her (‘You know the place is doing you good’); cautions her against ‘fancies’ (‘nothing was worse for a nervous patient’); and infantilizes her (calling her his ‘blessed little goose’). The second time she asks, he infantilizes her again (carrying her to bed, calling her his ‘darling’) and cautions her, once more, ‘not to let any silly fancies run away with you.’ After each denial, her psychosis deepens, and the reader understands what the rule of threes requires. When she makes her third and most desperate request, John amplifies his previous reactions, infantilizing her even more (‘What is it, little girl?’); dismissing her even more condescendingly (‘[Y]ou really are better, dear, whether you can see it or not. I am a doctor, dear, and I know’); and admonishing her ‘false and foolish fancy’ in his most ominous terms yet (‘There is nothing so dangerous…to a temperament like yours’). But he also does something novel. When she insists the rest cure is exacerbating her illness, he scoffs, ‘Bless her little heart! She shall be as sick as she pleases.’ In this third iteration of the pattern, he 3rd-personalizes her, as if he were discussing her with someone else. But the only other person in the room is the wallpaper woman. That is the apex of this escalation, then: unaware that she’s begun dissociating into ‘one’ and ‘you,’ and hallucinating a double, John inadvertently doubles her himself.

This final denial marks the point of no return for the narrator. She doesn’t ask to leave again: the only way out will be through. In the next entry—Entry Six, the midpoint of her diary—she regresses to her dissociative POV while describing the wallpaper’s latest transformation: 

You think you have mastered it, but…it turns a back-somersault…The outside pattern is a florid arabesque, reminding one of a fungus. If you can imagine a toadstool in joints…budding and sprouting in endless convolutions—why, that is something like it.

Unable to settle on a POV, her mind seems to be the thing in joints, budding and sprouting new pronouns—from ‘you’ to ‘one’ back to ‘you’ again—in endless convolutions. For her part, the faint figure has finished her metamorphosis into an imprisoned woman. At night, the narrator notices, the pattern ‘becomes bars!’; and the figure behind them—‘I didn’t realize for a long time what the thing was’—is now ‘as plain as can be’: ‘I am quite sure it is a woman.’ Observing her quietness during the day, the narrator reflects, ‘I fancy it is the pattern that keeps her so still…It keeps me quiet by the hour.’ We note the defiance in the verboten verb ‘fancy’ (she’s flouting John’s warnings). We also note the toggling from ‘It keeps her’ to ‘It keeps me.’ We’re familiar with this toggling from before (‘The children hated it! I should hate it’), so we know what to expect: now it seems like this woman will be the double she swaps fates with. 

With the appearance of the prison bars, the woman’s transformation into a double is complete. There’s no room left for the story to escalate in this same direction: if the narrator just kept noticing new resemblances between the woman and herself—‘Now I see a faint husband figure in the wallpaper. Why, he’s tying her to a bed!’—the reader would start to get restless. We sense that the story has to swerve soon, surprise us. For me, that swerve arrives in Entry Nine:

The front pattern does move—and no wonder! The woman behind shakes it!...And she is all the time trying to climb through. But nobody could climb through that pattern—it strangles so. I think that is why it has so many heads…the pattern strangles them off…and makes their eyes white!

What does a story do when it’s escalated its patterns as far as they can go? Hypostatize them. The designs are not lolling like a broken neck, they are broken necks; the figure is not like a woman shaking the wall, she is a woman, who does shake it. We’ve passed from the fancy of ‘seems like’ into the florid psychosis of ‘is.’ What’s inspired about this, narratively speaking, is that it introduces a new character into the story. Now that the thought threads are outside the narrator’s head, they can become plot. Now that the woman is a literal person, the narrator can do things to her, instead of just thinking about her. The woman can do things too. 

In the very next entry, the narrator spots her outside, creeping around in the garden: 

I think that woman gets out in the daytime. And I’ll tell you why—privately—I’ve seen her!....It must be very humiliating to be caught creeping by daylight! I always lock the doors when I creep by daylight.

The shock of the woman’s jailbreak is immediately supplanted by the shock of the narrator’s creeping. Since when does she creep? And why? For cardio? Because we’re only learning about her new creeping regimen after the fact, in a casual aside, the revelation catches us off guard. But we should have seen it coming: it’s just another escalation of the pronominal toggling she’s been practicing elsewhere. As soon as we read ‘She creeps by daylight,’ we might have predicted that, within a sentence or two, ‘I’ would be creeping as well. ‘I’ll tell you why’ is a similar escalation, the latest invocation of her imaginary reader. With the ending approaching, we feel, the story must be drawing closer to this ‘you.’ 

Let’s skip ahead to the final entry. Determined to catch the wallpaper woman, the narrator begins by helping her peel off the paper: ‘I pulled and she shook, I shook and she pulled…’ In the antimetabole of those reversed verbs—how ‘pulled and shook’ becomes ‘shook and pulled,’ with each verb passing between ‘I’ and ‘she’—we can feel how ‘I’ is becoming ‘she.’ We also get the payoff for the torn wallpaper. In Entry One, she noted that the children had stripped it off ‘about as far as I can reach,’ and we’ve been waiting ever since for her to reach it. Here, eleven entries later, she peels it off at last: ‘about as high as my head,’ ‘all the wallpaper I could reach.’ With that, the narrator has finally become the children. As if to underline this point, she promptly becomes them again in a different way: ‘How the children did tear about here!’ she marvels. ‘This bedstead is fairly gnawed.’ A few paragraphs later, she is gnawing the bedstead herself in frustration: ‘I bit off a little piece at one corner—but it hurt my teeth.’ The speed of this transformation is one of my favorite jokes in the story. It’s as if the story knows that the reader knows what the narrator’s basic deal is, her defining character trait. At the very moment that the reader might be thinking, ‘We get it, she becomes her doubles,’ the story just repeats the same gag, faster. Gnawing on the bedstead, she becomes her double in record time, not over the course of days, between a dozen diary entries, but instantaneously, between three paragraphs. This acceleration is a clear gesture of closure. Now that the story is almost over, this is the last call for any patterns to make a final appearance. Indeed, many do: ‘All those strangled heads and bulbous eyes and waddling fungus growths shriek with derision.’ Her eldritch metaphors, happily hypostatized, have returned as her chorus. 

With the wallpaper torn down, the narrator waits to catch the woman with a rope. Except no sooner has she established this expectation than she subverts it. Spotting more women outside her window, she wonders ‘if they all came out of the wallpaper, as I did? But I am securely fastened now by my well-hidden rope—you don’t get me out in the road there!’ Instead of capturing the wallpaper woman, the narrator becomes her, taking her place in the lasso. This is shocking, and funny, and very fun, but it’s also foreordained. Whenever the narrator took her double’s place in a sentence (‘She’s kept still, I’m kept quiet,’ ‘She creeps, I creep’), these reversals were rehearsals for this rope. She’s also finally arrived at her ‘you’: when the wallpaper woman hisses ‘You don’t get me out there!’, she seems to be addressing the narrator, and echoing her. So this is the only ‘you’ left to read (or write) her diary: neither a future self (in the future the narrator has lost her self) nor a living soul (the wallpaper woman is a ghost), the subject of the narrator’s second person is this second personality, who calls her ‘you’ right back. Freed from the wall, she creeps some victory laps around the room, but just then John arrives and cries out in horror. Here are the unimprovable final lines:

‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane? And I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!’ Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

To my mind, ‘in spite of you and Jane’ makes this ending. I almost want to say, it’s what makes it an ending. The narrator has achieved her change of state: by transforming into the wallpaper woman, she has ‘got out at last’ from her prison, her marriage, her name. ‘In spite of you and Jane’ is the new thought she can think in Entry Twelve that she couldn’t have thought in Entry One. This is, naturally, the first time we’re hearing of ‘Jane.’ We deduce that this is (or was) the narrator’s name, so she gains her name by losing it. The very moment that she, for the reader, becomes Jane, she has already become not-Jane, referring to her discarded identity in 3rd-person. Jane is just a stranger now, and even John is barely John. He begins the scene as ‘John’ and ‘John dear,’ but by the end he is merely ‘that man,’ a speedbump to her creeping. This is satisfying, too. When she reduces him to the anonymity of ‘that man,’ it functions as a narrative climax: she’s finished molting her memories of her marriage; he has truly become ‘one’s husband,’ rather than hers. But it’s likewise a formal climax: the story is paying him back for his 3rd-personalization from earlier. Bless his little heart—he shall faint as much as he pleases.

There’s one more formal climax worth underlining: the shift in tense, from present to past. When John arrives, the narrator maintains her diaristic present tense: ‘Why there’s John at the door!’ We’ve seen interruptions like this before (‘There comes John, and I must put this away’). Here, the diary entry continues after John’s arrival, but it shifts to past (‘“John dear!” said I’) and remains in past through the final line (‘I had to creep over him every time’). At one level, this tense shift is simply the story’s solution to a technical problem: namely, the challenge of representing simultaneous action in a diary (you can’t creep and write at the same time). But at another level, past tense has clear implications for the narrator’s fate. If she’s writing retrospectively, it means that she’s still writing. Wherever she is now—that same room, five minutes later; an insane asylum, five months later; inside the wall, for eternity—she’s still keeping her diary. And crucially, in this future, she remains not-Jane. That is what past tense is telling us: ‘I’ve got out at last,’ said I, ‘in spite of you and Jane?’ The ‘I’ writing this sentence—the ‘I’ saying ‘said I’—is still not-Jane’s I. In this way, past tense projects a future beyond the horizon of the final line, just as effectively as future tense. ‘I had to creep over him’ is subtly more climactic than present tense (‘I creep over him’) would have been, since her change feels more permanent in past. As with the POV shift, the new tense helps accommodate this transformation. When the narrator changes her identity, the story has to change its shape: the container bends to remain commensurate with her consciousness.

What I mean to admire here is the multidimensional inevitability of this ending. Jane’s break from 1st-person isn’t just narratively inevitable, a result of John’s claustrophobic control. And it’s not just psychologically inevitable, a result of her fixation on doubles. It’s also stylistically inevitable, a result of the kinds of sentences she likes to think in. Her syntax is the blueprint of her soul. From the moment she wrote ‘what is one to do?’, it’s as if she was destined to become that ‘one.’ 3rd-person was her only available emergency exit from the cage of 1st-person. In glimpsing herself through her double’s eyes—in glimpsing herself as Jane, through the double vision of 1st and 3rd—she attains the new point of view that both she and the story needed: call it 1st-depersonalization. POV shifts like ‘in spite of you and Jane’ may feel surprising as they’re happening, but on reflection we realize that the story couldn’t have ended—not really—until they happened. Of course, the ending might read more or less the same without this line: she would still become the wallpaper woman, still creep over John. Except it wouldn’t be an ending without this line, because a major formal pattern—all those ones and yous—would feel unresolved. The story may have reached a climax, but its form wouldn’t have.

There’s a larger lesson here, I think, about endings: how a story’s most unexpected and necessary developments can be emergent properties of its style; how, whenever you hit a wall (or some wallpaper) in a draft, the path forward may already have been prepared somewhere behind you. We can almost imagine Gilman arriving at ‘in spite of you and Jane’ in this way. We can imagine her, for instance, drafting the line ‘I’ve got out at last’ and getting stuck on it: it’s good, she feels, but merely good, the ending is still missing something. We can imagine her reading over the story from the beginning, pausing at ‘what is one to do?’, and gradually coming to see it: how the answer to this question—the answer to the ending—is embedded in the form of the question itself, in its shift to 3rd-person. That is what one is to do. And so we can imagine Gilman’s thrill in returning to the final paragraph and adding ‘in spite of you and Jane.’ Now that that line has been written…now the story can end. (Note 2)

3. His Thinking Was A Thinking Outside The Tank 

Julio Cortázar’s ‘Axolotl’ presents a different way of structuring a narrative like ‘The Yellow Wall-paper.’ It’s essentially the same story. The plot is that a man stares at an axolotl. He grows so obsessed with it that, eventually, he projects himself inside it, transmigrating his mind into its body. Whereas ‘The Yellow Wall-Paper’ escalates its way to this metamorphosis in a straight line—it’s relentlessly linear, all rising action—‘Axolotl’ adopts the shape of a loop. Within the first paragraph, the transformation has already taken place. Here is Paul Blackburn’s translation:

There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantes and stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl.

‘Axolotl’ begins where ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ ends. The story opens by establishing a doubled narrator: the human ‘I’ versus the axolotl ‘I.’ The opening likewise establishes two timelines, two tenses for distinguishing between these delaminated voices: everything human belongs to the past (‘There was a time when I thought’), while the story is being narrated from the axolotl’s present (‘Now I am an axolotl’). It’s easy to see how this narrative shape could be made compatible with ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’: ‘There was a time when I thought a great deal about the wallpaper women. Now I am a wallpaper woman.’ In that version, lines like ‘I got out at last, in spite of you and Jane’ might not come as such a surprise. From the first page, we’d be waiting for the moment when the story’s dual and dueling narrators would diverge, when each ‘I’ would become ‘she’ to the other. This is how ‘Axolotl’ invites us to read it. 

Since the story introduces both narrators upfront, it’s free to play them off one another contrapuntally. Lines that begin in the voice of one narrator end in the voice of the other, creating a Möbius-strip effect of merging selves. Here he is—here they are—describing the cramped conditions of the tank: ‘The axolotls huddled on the wretched narrow (only I can know how narrow and wretched) floor of moss and stone.’ This is similar to Gilman’s ‘She creeps/I creep’ toggling, except that the sentence shifts voices mid-thought, beginning in the human past (‘The axolotls huddled’) before being interrupted by the axolotl’s present (‘only I can know’). As in ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’ there’s a crisscrossing antimetabole of adjectives (how ‘wretched narrow’ becomes ‘narrow and wretched’), the better to enact, at the level of syntax, the narrators’ swapping subject positions. The punctuation is lovely, too: because the axolotl’s interjection is enclosed in parentheses, it’s as if this parenthetical is itself the narrow and wretched tank in which his ‘I’ is confined. But that container is equally the source of his authority: from inside the parentheses, inside present tense, inside his new body, he knows things the other ‘I’ can’t know.  

Elsewhere the story negotiates its passage between narrators via pronouns. Here’s the human narrator describing the axolotls: ‘I saw a rosy little body, translucent…ending in a fish’s tail of extraordinary delicacy, the most sensitive part of our body.’ Again, a sentence that begins outside the tank (‘a body’) ends inside it (‘our body’), with the singular human ‘I’ gradually entering the plurality of the axolotls’ ‘we.’ This movement across minds is mapped onto the sensory modalities of the modifiers: we travel from external sight (‘rosy,’ ‘little,’ ‘translucent’) to internal touch (‘sensitive’), reproducing the trajectory from human to axolotl, from outside to inside, from perception to proprioception. The paragraph ends by tracing this same trajectory in reverse. We begin in the axolotl narrator’s plural perspective, as he laments the cramped conditions inside the tank: ‘we barely move…The time feels like it’s less if we stay quietly.’ Then, in the next line, we’ve phased to the other side of the glass again, observing the tank from a human point of view: ‘It was their quietness that made me lean toward them fascinated…’ 

The narrator recounts his mounting fascination in a straightforward fashion. The first time he visited the aquarium, he says, he felt an instant affinity with the axolotls and began returning every day. ‘There’s nothing strange in this,’ he insists, ‘because after the first minute I knew that we were linked, that something infinitely lost and distant kept pulling us together.’ This infinitely distant link becomes the primary pattern that the story escalates. Each time he describes the axolotls, he discovers some fresh but ineffable evidence of their union, their ‘mysterious humanity’ and ‘profound relation to myself.’ He notes their toes’ ‘minutely human nails’ (not ‘minute and human’ but ‘minutely human’: preserving the faintest trace or residue of the human). He imagines human minds immured in their bodies, crying out ‘Save us, save us.’ He notes their golden eyes, which devour him ‘in a cannibalism of gold.’ ‘Cannibalism,’ of course, implies that he is already part axolotl, but he’s not ready to complete this thought. Every description brings him tantalizingly closer to the threshold of what is, for the reader, a foregone metamorphosis, so reading these passages feels a little like watching Gregor Samsa wander through a beetle exhibit. We want to warn him. We know, will have always known, what’s coming. Finally it comes:

My face was pressed against the glass…I saw from very close up the face of an axolotl... No transition and no surprise. I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass. Then my face drew back and I understood.

The narrator’s mind simply glides to the other side of the glass, the way that his sentences have been phasing through the tank throughout the story. This is so disorienting for him that he can still describe his human face, delusionally, as ‘my’ face. What he doesn’t realize is that the sentence ‘Then my face drew back and I understood’ already contains two narrators: the ‘I’ of ‘I understood’ is the axolotl’s, distinct from the human ‘my’ of ‘my face.’ The axolotl has autotomized his human ‘I,’ the way that a trapped lizard sheds its tail, and the very fact that the face is drawing back means it’s ‘his’ face now. His pronouns just haven’t caught up with this new reality yet. He doesn’t achieve this 1st-depersonalization until the following paragraph: 

I was an axolotl and now I knew…He was outside the aquarium, his thinking was a thinking outside the tank. Recognizing him, being him himself, I was an axolotl…

By the time he announces ‘I was an axolotl and now I knew,’ he’s finished transmigrating into his new 1st-person. From inside this ‘I,’ he can say that ‘he’ is outside. Except even here, his sense of self remains distributed across both bodies. This bilocality is beautifully evoked in the uncanny grammar of ‘being him himself.’ The ostensible subject of ‘being’ is ‘I’: ‘being him…I was an axolotl.’ We would normally expect the intensifying pronoun to agree with this subject: ‘being him myself.’ What ‘himself’ suggests is that ‘being’ secretly has two subjects: both ‘I’ and ‘he’ are being ‘him’ here. The narrator may think that he’s left his human thinking outside the tank, but remnants of that ‘he’ are still thinking inside his ‘I’ (and vice versa), vying over each verb. ‘Himself’ is perhaps my favorite word in the story, a tiny tour de force of precise style. We might trip over it at first—it sounds off, wrong somehow—but in retrospect we recognize its final rightness. If his mind has been bisected, ‘he’ and ‘I’ must share custody of ‘being.’ 

With the arrival of ‘he,’ we’ve re-arrived at the story’s climax. The metamorphosis that had already taken place in the first paragraph (‘Now I am an axolotl’) has at last taken place in the narrative (‘I was an axolotl now’). Each ‘I’ has become ‘he’ to the other. Having returned to its beginning, what’s left for the story to do, before it ends? Cortázar is a connoisseur of strange loops, and he must have sensed that there were other loops left to close. The largest concerns the story’s authorship. Because if the narrator really is trapped inside an axolotl, who’s writing all this? This is a variant of the problem ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ faced with diaristic present tense. Cortázar resolves it—if ‘resolves’ is the right word—in the uroboric final paragraph, when the narrator notes that his human self has stopped visiting:

Since the only thing I can do is think, I could think about him a lot. It occurs to me that at the beginning we continued to communicate…at the beginning, I was capable of returning to him…and of keeping awake his desire to know us better…I believe that all this succeeded in communicating something to him in those first days, when I was still he…I console myself by thinking that perhaps he is going to write a story about us, that, believing he’s making up a story, he’s going to write all this about the axolotls. 

Whereas the story began with the human narrator thinking ‘a great deal’ about the axolotls, it ends with the axolotl thinking about the human ‘a lot.’ And what the axolotl is thinking is that ‘he’ might come to write a story, the same story that we’re reading. Yet there’s another loop implicit in point of view: in order to write ‘all this,’ ‘he’ would of course have to become ‘I’ once more, since the story is narrated in 1st-person. So the very act of narration will require traveling the same trajectory of transmigration. Staring at his typewriter as he had stared at the tank, the human narrator will have to project himself into the axolotl all over again, into its ‘I’ as into its body, circling back to the beginning of a strange loop that was always also its end.

That is what I take the repetition of ‘at the beginning’ to signify. What else can this mean, besides ‘at the beginning of this story’? From the very first time he visited the axolotl, it’s as if his future self was already inside it, calling out to him. That is the mystery that the axolotl was trying to communicate, ‘when I was still he.’ Now his instant affinity with the axolotls isn’t so puzzling: this was a Narcissus story all along. When he felt a ‘distant and lost’ link; or a ‘mysterious humanity’; or a ‘profound relation’…he already was that link, that humanity, that relation. He was the voice crying ‘Save us,’ and the eyes devouring him were his eyes. Not just a cannibalism but an autophagia of gold. ‘There’s nothing strange in this,’ he had kept insisting, but it would seem that there was, at least, a strange loop in it. The story, like its sentences, has a Möbius-strip structure: his metamorphosed self had to have always been in the axolotl, stoking his obsession, in order to bring its metamorphosis about. Even when it was ‘it,’ it was ‘I.’

Like ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’ the final paragraph signals this change of state via a formal change, a shift in tense: ‘he is going to write a story.’ We leave behind the past/present binary of the human/axolotl narrators and enter the future construction (the ‘going to’ future) of the story’s author. So the story ends by projecting an aftermath beyond its literal ending. And in true strange loop fashion, that aftermath is simultaneously a before-math. We finish the last line imagining ‘him’ writing the first line: ‘There was a time when I was going to think a lot about the axolotls.’

The narrator has already explained why such formal changes are necessary. That is one meaning of the line ‘his thinking is a thinking outside the tank.’ If a change in container entails a change in consciousness, then a change in consciousness requires a change in container. With each transformation, his ‘I’ will need a new tense, a new pronoun, a new point of view. 

4. He Did His Best To Compose My Face

With these endings in mind, I returned to ‘Portonaccio Sarcophagus.’ Here’s the original ending:

I expected her still to recognize me. And if she didn’t? If she failed at first to recognize me in the terminal, at least I might know by the confusion in her eyes something of what she was seeing. It’s me, Mom. Don’t you remember? I am Prado, I am also Prado’s father. I venture to say I am also Pompilius, your son’s friend. Where’s that hundred you owe me?

And here is what I changed it to:

I expected her still to recognize me. And if she didn’t? If she failed at first to place me? At least I will have known, by the confusion in her eyes, something of what she was seeing, as she watched her daughters embrace this stranger. As he turned to introduce himself, and did his best to compose my face.

There are a few minor changes to note. To avoid the limp repetition of ‘recognize me…recognize me,’ the third line now uses ‘place,’ a stronger verb with a double meaning. Narratively, this ending extends the description of the airport reunion to include the narrator’s sisters, and the Nietzsche refrain, meanwhile, has been moved elsewhere. Formally, this ending retains the shift in tense, but the narrator uses a different future construction: instead of a modal future (‘I might know’), he employs the future anterior (‘I will have known’). ‘Will’ is likewise stronger than ‘might,’ constituting a more confident prediction, and it’s perhaps more satisfying as a climax for that reason alone. But ‘will have’ is also an echo of a previous thought: when describing that cursed photo of his mother, the narrator had reflected that the future anterior was the tense most appropriate to omens (after she dies, the photo will have been an omen of her death). By using that tense again, issuing his own omen, he makes room for this thought thread to conclude, while mixing temporalities in a way that suits the story’s themes of memory (the future anterior is the place where the future has already become the past). The same can be said for the phrase ‘compose my face.’ The facelessness motif culminates here, as does the word ‘compose’: the narrator has spent the story meditating on composition, decomposition, non-composition (Pompilius’s face has not been composed), so these distinct meanings can all be gathered up in that last repetition.

But the most significant change, for me, is also the smallest, the shift in POV: ‘He did his best to compose my face.’ The addition of this ‘he,’ I understood, was the movement that the ending had been missing. Now the narrator truly inhabits his mother’s 1st-person perspective, losing himself in her memory loss and seeing his face through her eyes. My editor had been right: the narrator did need a final insight regarding facelessness, forgetfulness, distortion. His own face had to be estranged, and this change had to be conveyed, formally, through point of view, through leaving his ‘I’ behind: he had to become ‘he’ to himself. Reading back over the story, I could even appreciate how this 1st-depersonalization had been prepared in advance, not only in Nietzsche’s expansive ‘I am’—which incorporates every ‘he’ in history—but also in the narrator’s riff on Google Maps. When describing its pixelated pedestrians, he’d noted how Street View shifts ‘from the aerial two-dimensionality of the map to a 1st-person three-dimensional perspective.’ Since he had already toggled between 3rd- and 1st-person camera perspectives, this toggling was stylistically available to him, in a sense, for the pronouns in his final sentence. 

Only once I had written this sentence did I feel the story could end. After projecting himself into the sarcophagus, Google Maps, the future, the narrator projects beyond 1st-person altogether, as Gilman and Cortázar’s narrators had. What their stories had shown me was how formal changes can register narrative changes. More than that, form can make narrative changes felt, allowing readers to detect deep shifts in a character’s consciousness through the surface disturbance of a single word. In my original ending, the narrator had achieved the shift in consciousness but not the shift in form. We couldn’t feel his change of state because the container hadn’t changed. ‘He did his best to compose my face’ is, hopefully, his version of ‘in spite of you and Jane’ or ‘Being him himself’: it’s his way of getting outside the wallpaper, thinking inside the tank. 

***

1 A talk delivered to Columbia University’s writing program, as part of the Creative Writing Lecture Series, on March 10, 2025.

2 But this reading can’t: I’ll conclude by acknowledging that there is a version of the ending without this line. My fantasy or fiction of Gilman arriving at ‘in spite of you and Jane’ can be met, in the scholarship, with a counter-account: namely, that this line is in fact a mistake. Some scholars speculate that Gilman meant to write ‘in spite of you and Jennie’ (Jennie is John’s sister, one of the narrator’s jailers) and accidentally wrote ‘Jane’ instead. That is why critics such as Susan Larsen, writing in 1989, can still describe ‘The Yellow Wall-paper’ as ‘the story of an unnamed woman,’ and can refer to ‘the cryptic sentence at the end of the story’ as ‘possibly a slip of Gilman’s pen’; as well as why the novelist Halle Butler, in the introduction to a 2021 Modern Library edition of Gilman’s works, can describe the story as having ‘an unnamed first-person narrator.’ Though The New England Magazine originally published the story in 1892 with ‘Jane,’ later editors took the liberty of correcting Gilman’s ‘slip of the pen’ when anthologizing it, such that variant publications actually do read ‘Jennie.’ In her casebook of its publication history, Julie Bates Dock dates the first instance of ‘Jennie’ to 1934, in E.A. Cross’s A Book of the Short Story. This variant filtered upward through other anthologies in the twentieth century—including 1937’s The Haunted Omnibus, 1967’s These Will Chill You: Twelve Terrifying Tales of Malignant Evil, 1971’s Ladies of Horror: Two Centuries of Supernatural Stories by the Gentle Sex, and so on—before being included in 1995’s Points of View: An Anthology of Short Stories, a popular craft textbook in creative writing classes when I was growing up. This would have been where I first read ‘The Yellow Wall-paper,’ as a teenager, when Points of View was assigned in my intro fiction workshop. So the first version of the story I ever read is, so to speak, the wrong version: it doesn’t even include my favorite line. I’m not a scholar, and I’m not interested in proving that ‘in spite of you and Jane’ is the ‘right’ line. My reading may be a misreading. But one of the things I hope my (mis)reading has suggested is that ‘in spite of you and Jane’ is the most meaningful line, the most densely interesting dialogue that the story could end on. If nearly every sentence of the story has been preparing the narrator’s loss of identity, her passage out of 1st-person, then having the narrator gloat over her former self (‘Jane’) is a more thematically charged climax—by which I suppose I mean, a more formally determined one—than having her gloat over her sister-in-law. Whether or not Gilman intended this ending, the story demands and deserves it.