Studies in the Novel, Volume 41, number 4 (Winter 2009). Copyright © 2009 by the University of North Texas. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

APOCRYPHAL TRAUMA IN E.L. DOCTOROW’S THE BOOK OF DANIEL

AARON DEROSA

They are changing our names in the sky,making their own insidious designs.I am one man with just the normal equipment,saying No, offering little essays to the wind.They are removing the vowels now.They are erasing the beginning and the end.

—Stephen Dunn, “The Bad Angels”

Published in a time of bitter political upheaval, E.L. Doctorow’s 1971 The Book of Daniel is a novel about the formation of communal narratives and their traumatic implications. A historiographic metafictional tale of the 1951 Rosenberg trial and subsequent execution in 1953, Doctorow’s story of the Isaacsons is told from the perspective of their surviving child Daniel. On the surface, Daniel’s first person retrospective narrative of his parents’ ordeal seems like the traumatic repetition of what Cathy Caruth would call an “unclaimed experience” through a literal/literary mimetic performance.1 Indeed much of the current criticism of the novel assumes the primacy of the parent-child relationship and, in turn, seizes the opportunity to discuss the significance of the Rosenberg trial (see Detweiler, Levine, Morgenstern, Pepper, and Tokarczyk). But this reading is complicated in that it is Susan’s suicide attempt, not the death of his parents, that is the direct impetus for Daniel’s cathartic narrative. While the historical occasion of the Rosenberg-as-Isaacson execution is critical, its significance has obscured the more subtle trauma relations at stake in the novel and led to a misdiagnosis of Daniel’s trauma.

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Such a misdiagnosis has the potential to repeat the traumatic moment. In her discussion of law and trauma in the second half of the twentieth century, Shoshana Felman identifies the private and the collective as the two structural poles of trauma trials. While there is a possibility that trials can create a positive “collective tale of mourning” or “sacred narrative” (129), the reverse can happen as well where a trial subordinates the private trauma to the collective, erasing the victims’ narrative in favor of a “lesson” (77). The historical Rosenberg affair certainly bears the marks of the latter, as Leslie Fiedler suggests that the Rosenbergs “became, despite themselves and their official defenders, symbols of the conflict between the human and the political, the individual and the state” (33). What was first an espionage trial quickly became a battleground for the conflicting collective responses to the Cold War: the threat of communism, treason, and nuclear holocaust on the one hand and calls of anti-Semitism, the communist witch-hunt’s violation of civil liberties, and the fairness of the legal system on the other. Doctorow’s novel makes a similar move for the Isaacsons. Daniel writes that “it is clear that although [his parents Rochelle] and Paul will be found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, it is for the crime of treason they will be sentenced” (201-2). In other words, they will be punished for a perceived crime, not the crime of which they were convicted. In part, then, Daniel’s narrative is a recovery of the memory of his parents’ execution from the community’s distortions imputed in the Isaacson verdict. But such a reading oversimplifies the recovery process, refusing to take into account the removed and reactive nature of Daniel’s investigation into his parents’ lives and deaths. Pulled clear of the oppressive collective tale, we can glimpse Daniel’s initial narrative impetus for what it truly is: an effort to negotiate not the 1953 trauma of his parents’ execution but the 1967 suicide attempt of his sister. In this reclamation we find that beneath Daniel’s narrative is the fatally unspoken story of his sister. Susan’s trauma bears witness not just to her parents’ execution but a broader collective narrative that has overwritten, contained, and re-performed this execution, silencing her traumatic recovery. Perhaps more devastating for Susan is Daniel’s complicity in this silencing, a realization that threatens Daniel’s own traumatic recovery from Susan’s suicide attempt. It is this curious intersection of individual psychological trauma and sweeping cultural narratives within Doctorow’s work that adeptly dramatizes and problematizes “the way in which one’s own trauma is tied up with the trauma of another” (Caruth 8). A postmodern novel reflecting on the conformity of the preceding era, The Book of Daniel depicts the traumatic repercussions of such conservatism. Though Daniel tries to make sense of his life through the perceived parallel to his biblical counterpart in the “Book of Daniel” (BoD), a more appropriate referent might be found in the silent intertext of the apocryphal “Book of Susanna” (BoS), which figures heavily in the novel but

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has been almost entirely absent in the criticism. Unlike the BoD that posits its title character as an analyst of dreams, the BoS casts Daniel as a legal guardian in a trial that reveals the threat of the collective construction of trauma and reconfigures Daniel’s relationship to his sister and her suicide along these lines. Recognizing this relationship reveals that Daniel’s narrative is not just a process of individual traumatic recovery from the death of his sister, but a more sweeping commentary on recovering personal trauma amidst the silencing of large, cultural narratives.

Trauma and Narrative At the heart of Doctorow’s novel rests a trauma. Who experiences that trauma and what they experience, however, has not yet been fully explored. Perhaps the best place to start any discussion of trauma in contemporary discourse is with Cathy Caruth’s seminal work, Unclaimed Experience, which has sparked a radical re-conception of trauma theory over the past two decades. Extending Sigmund Freud’s theories regarding war neuroses, Caruth articulates a definition of trauma that acknowledges not only the risk of death, but more importantly the incomprehensibility of survival. Emphasizing the Freudian notion of a belated response, Caruth claims that a traumatic event is never experienced directly; trauma is the very missing of the event. “What returns to haunt the victim,” she tells us, “is not only the reality of the violent event but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known” (6). Because it cannot be fully known, it is unrepresentable and only manifests through literal, veridical repetition (in dreams, flashbacks, etc.). Caruth’s emphasis on the literal repetition has garnered significant resistance—particularly from Ruth Leys—who rejects the notion that the experience of trauma must be veridical. Insofar as every memory is “subject to the effects of distortion” as it passes into narration (Leys 243), the insistence on a literal, pure trauma seems untenable. However, narration in whatever form, we are told, is crucial in traumatic coping. Laurie Vickroy tells us that “for healing to take place, survivors must find ways to tell their stories and to receive some social acknowledgment if not acceptance” (19). Daniel’s “survivor” status has always been a subject of critical inquiry and the link to narration is made explicit in the title of Paul Levine’s article “The Writer as Survivor.” Michelle Tokarczyk follows suit, tracing Daniel’s behavior as indicative of survivor mentality, and more recently Naomi Morgenstern has attempted to resituate Daniel’s trauma through primal scene imagery. Daniel’s narrative has thus always had an historical association with trauma studies. These studies have all opened up the text in a variety of ways, but do not go far enough in explaining the complex layers of trauma that Doctorow weaves into his novel. The assumed primacy of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson is understandable; Daniel uses their story to contextualize his life, he becomes obsessed with

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proving their innocence, and in general the story is “about” the Isaacson legacy. But curiously Daniel’s tale neither begins nor ends with the tragic execution of his parents. Instead, fourteen years removed from their deaths, the narrative begins with Susan’s suicide attempt and concludes with her funeral. The complexly interwoven flashbacks and historical diatribes always come back to the present-day plot where Daniel attempts to write his doctoral dissertation, ostensibly the text of the novel. Through the writing process, Daniel is forced to confront the story of his parents’ execution, which he had tried to leave behind. His narrative enacts a traumatic recovery process where Daniel places himself as both patient and analyst. The latter is an association he maintains with his biblical counterpart from the BoD in which the title character interprets the “dreams, visions or apparitions” of Babylonian kings (11). In many ways, this association is accurate: Doctorow’s Daniel (D-Daniel)2 analyzes historical figures for his dissertation, psychoanalyzes his sister’s condition, and legally analyzes his parents’ case. Such has been the accepted critical reading of Daniel (see Detweiler 76, Morgenstern 69, and Pepper 486). However, Caruth tells us that trauma “is never simply one’s own” and that “we are implicated in each other’s traumas” (24). She connects individuals through a “contagion” model that suggests trauma can be passed on like an infection from narrator to listener. But this construction relies on metaphor and falls short of helping us examine intricate trauma relations with any veracity. Yet, as Roger Luckhurst points out, Caruth’s work is still the place “where the lines feeding notions of cultural trauma converge” (13). More practical headway was made by Dominic LaCapra in Writing History, Writing Trauma where he analyzed public discourse as a manifestation of a repetition compulsion within a traumatized community. This is precisely Jeffrey Alexander’s project in the edited collection Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Though he dismisses the work of Caruth and LaCapra as “lay” trauma theory for its lack of sociological rigor, he, along with the other contributors, establish a methodology for analyzing the “trauma process” whereby “carrier groups” lay claim to a particular event as traumatic, initiating a negotiation process to determine “the ideal and material consequences” of that event for the community (22). The resulting “collective narrative” can be said to be the dominant social interpretation of an event. (I use the term “collective narrative” here because this process need not necessarily be traumatic. As Alexander tells us, “trauma is a socially mediated attribution,” and as such, a community may engage in the trauma process without becoming traumatized [8].) Alexander’s model is useful but also reveals the potential for such narratives to repeat the original trauma or generate new ones. This is the subject of Shoshana Felman’s work with the legal system in The Juridical Unconscious. On the one hand, Felman argues, trials can form a beneficial collective narrative of a trauma as in the 1961 Eichmann trial, in which the previously silenced and disparate voices of Shoah survivors were given a platform to

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voice their pain in the public sphere. The trial succeeded in creating a story “of the victims’ suffering and of the victims’ recovery of language” outside of the “political and military story of the Second World War,” establishing a collective trauma from the voices of the individual victims (128). Conversely, trials can repeat a private trauma as was the case in the 1995 O.J. Simpson case, where a murder trial was lost in the competing collective narratives that vied for dominance. What was at stake was “the historical (collective) trauma of the persecutions, the abuses, the discrimination, [and] the murders…suffered by African Americans, along with and in confrontation with…the persecutions, the abuses, the humiliations, and the murders suffered by women (and by battered wives)” (6). This conflict had the deleterious effect of repeating the trauma: “To the extent that the verdict erases Simpson’s murdered wife, or makes the murder—and the murdered woman—totally irrelevant…to the message, the trial in effect repeats the murder” (77). The important distinction to draw between these two examples is that the Eichmann trial established a collective trauma to foster communal healing whereas the Simpson trial was subject to a collective narrative that erased the victim and repeated a private trauma. Felman would have us believe, then, that the challenge of the legal system in cases of trauma is maintaining objectivity in the face of collective narratives that seek to silence dissent, either overtly or covertly. America’s cultural climate in the 1950s did not offer much room for resisting dominant narratives and very few assumed the innocence of the Rosenbergs who were accused of being both Communists (which they never admitted to) and nuclear spies (which was never proven). Historian Ellen Schrecker tells us that in the ‘50s, trials were the most powerful weapon in the “construction of the anti-Communist consensus” and even before they had taken the stand, a verdict was fairly clear (22).

The weakness of the government’s case did not preclude a conviction, for in the superheated atmosphere of the trial in the spring of 1951, it was not hard for the prosecutors to convince a jury of the Rosenbergs’ guilt. Nor, given his own conviction that the case was of earthshaking importance, did the trial judge, Irving Kaufman…seriously hesitate about sentencing the two to death. (34)

The Cold War fervor effectively erased the Rosenbergs from the trial, which may account, in part, for Ethel’s conviction for which, evidence has shown, there was never a case. Unlike Felman’s summation of the Simpson trial that supposedly repeated the murders, the Rosenberg trial generated them. But the executions of Julius and Ethel would only register as traumatic insofar as there were those psychologically affected by the verdict; such was not the case in the Rosenberg trial.3 Doctorow’s reimagining of the trial through the eyes of their children posits the reverse. From the beginning, both Daniel and Susan struggle

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with the deaths of their parents, manifested in Susan’s violent revolutionary affiliations and Daniel’s sexual abusiveness among other things. Their trauma testifies to the failure of the legal system to dispense justice. Felman suggests that sometimes such legal failures are “necessary failures” that offer a “conceptual breakthrough” in legal logic (165). “Great trials,” Felman tells us, “are perhaps specifically those trials whose very failures have their own necessity and their own literary, cultural, and jurisprudential speaking power” (166). Doctorow himself tells us that “the most important trials in our history, those that reverberate in our lives and have most meaning for our future are those in which the judgment is called into question: Scopes, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs. Facts are buried, exhumed, deposed, contradicted, recanted” (Doctorow, “False Documents” 227). If Doctorow’s novel provides the speaking power for the historical Rosenberg trial, it is a curious voice that we hear. Daniel does not just challenge the verdict—he specifically makes no claims as to his parents’ guilt or innocence. Instead, the criminal justice system’s ability to reinforce established notions of guilt and innocence is turned on its head through Daniel’s traumatic narrative. This becomes clearer as we begin to recover the ignored intertext, the apocryphal BoS, where trial and silence are the dominant images.4

“The Book of Susanna” The absence of the BoS in the text as well as in the criticism is not surprising given Susanna/Susan’s silence in both. Naomi Morgenstern recognizes the intertextual reference and uses it to claim that the biblical figure is “a fantasy that allows [Daniel] to be the efficacious hero that he is not,” but she misidentifies it as a “story about Daniel” before ushering it out of sight (73). Brian Dillon goes a step further, identifying it as the “sacred precursor” to Doctorow’s text but writes it off as Doctorow’s textual fingerprints, claiming that Daniel only “loosely grasps his ancient sacred precursor texts” (373). But there is much evidence to suggest that Daniel is aware of his apocryphal counterpart. Though Daniel never addresses the BoS directly, he comes close in his playful manipulation of Susan’s name, calling her “Susyanna” at various points (10, 19). More telling is Daniel’s familiarity with the critical discussion surrounding his biblical counterpart (B-Daniel) whom Daniel refers to as a “minor, if not totally Apocryphal figure (or figures)” (11). His awareness of the debate surrounding the potentially multiple Daniels described in the Bible—notably in Ezekiel but also in another apocryphal text, “Bel and the Dragon”—suggests a far more educated conception of the character. Indeed, D-Daniel’s comments parrot Roy B. Chamberlin and Herman Feldman, the editors of the 1950 Dartmouth Bible, which he identifies as his bible of choice (6). Chamberlin and Feldman, in their brief discussion about the linguistic discrepancies of the BoD, suggest it “belong[ed] to the period of The Apocrypha” and thus place

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it “as the last of the thirty-nine books of the Old Testament” (712). While the BoD is generally considered canonical, the Dartmouth Bible’s placement of the text as the last book of the Old Testament calls this choice into question in its headnotes as well as visually: the last page of “Daniel” faces the title page for “The Apocrypha.” D-Daniel’s references to the Dartmouth Bible’s editorial notes that directly link the BoD with the Apocrypha, and his awareness of the “multiple Daniels,” point to his familiarity with the BoS. In brief, the apocryphal tale tells of the beautiful Susanna who bathes in her garden while two elders lust after her from afar. Cornering her, they demand she “submit” to them lest they tell the community she had done so anyway. She refuses and is brought to trial. The elders make their case, are taken at their word, and Susanna would have been put to death if not for her prayers and the subsequent intervention of Daniel, who questions the elders individually, unearths their lie, and puts them to death for their deception. Responding to God’s summons, Daniel is asked to protect Susanna by taking on the role of lawyer, a very different responsibility from B-Daniel who is described as an “interpret[er] of dreams” (11). While the “analyst” descriptor is not lost on A-Daniel, it is subordinate to the larger role of legal guardian. Perhaps one of the most troubling characteristics of A-Daniel’s legal “representation” is the silence of the one he represents. Although he succeeds in protecting Susanna from execution, he seemingly does so at her expense. Dillon acknowledges this in his brief discussion of the apocryphal text:

No one asks Susanna if she has anything to say—not her husband, her parents, not even Daniel. Even though the narrator’s very first sentence asserted she maintained a blameless reputation, Susanna is not allowed to speak. Furthermore, the narrator fails to note her response following the revised verdict; the whole focus shifts to Daniel’s triumph. To top off the neglect and abuse of Susanna, her story gets shoved out of the main body of Old Testament works. (373)

Akin to the collective narratives that overwrite private trauma in Felman’s Juridical Unconscious, Susanna’s adultery trial and near-execution are erased in light of the pro-Daniel collective narrative that arises out of it. While Daniel is held “in great reputation in the sight of the people” (Chamberlin and Feldman 804), Susanna is silenced, her private trauma rewritten and repeated. The relationship with Felman compels us to address to what degree this trial might be a “necessary failure.” Today we might consider that the silence itself is the trial’s speaking power. Written in the 1970s, the novel bears with it a definite understanding of the ‘50s as a rigidly conformist era characterized by loyalty oaths, blacklists, and suppressed dissent. This is evident in yet another intertextual reference that was sure to have crossed D-Daniel’s eye: Carlisle Floyd’s 1956 opera Susannah. Based loosely on the apocryphal story, Floyd’s version is a “McCarthy-era meditation on ‘how people like to believe what’s

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bad’” (Estren). Floyd’s retelling takes place in a small Tennessee town where Susannah’s dancing draws the ire of women and her bathing the lust of men. After being raped by her pastor, she becomes the “whore” that the community accuses her of being. While Susannah lives, she does so at the expense of her reputation and virtue, severing all ties with the community. Ultimately, all that is heard of Susannah by the community is the report of her shotgun scaring away would-be aggressors from her home. For Floyd it is hearsay, rumor, and social pressure that condemn Susannah and force her into isolation and silence, not the law. Contrary to the apocryphal tale, Susannah is allowed to speak but is never heard. Wildly popular, winner of numerous awards, and one of the most performed American operas in history, the image of Susannah/Susanna/“Susyanna” would have most likely been familiar to Daniel. Though its potential repercussions for the novel abound, the apocryphal text reveals two things at its core: the threat of the collective narrative and a fundamental change in Daniel’s perceived relationship to his sister from “analyst” to “legal guardian.” Daniel certainly recognizes both roles, evident in his encounter with Susan at the sanitarium. The two barely communicate until Daniel sighs and Susan is roused to speak. Patting him on the back, she states: “They’re still fucking us…. Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture” (9). It is the only time we hear her voice in the present of the novel (although the novel’s flashbacks give her voice elsewhere) and the interaction acts as both summons and condemnation. In terms of the latter, Susan’s physical contact echoes the religiously symbolic “laying on of hands,” a ritual act of condemnation that has its roots in Leviticus, where witnesses lay their hands on the accused before he or she is stoned (24:14). Such imagery is echoed in the BoS where “the two elders stood up in the midst of the people, and laid their hands upon [Susanna’s] head” (Chamberlin and Feldman 804). Daniel acknowledges this transference, stating that “Susan could restore in him the old cloying sense of family,” the psychological and legal guilt Daniel associates with the family name (9). The religious undertones of the moment are brought to the fore as, immediately after Daniel’s encounter with Susan, the narrative flashes back to Susan’s first declaration of religious faith: a faith predicated on justice and condemnation. “‘He’ll get them all,’ she whispered. ‘He’ll get every one of them’” (10). The narrative’s return to the present is still marked by the language of the “sacred precursor” text as Daniel manipulates Susan’s name, calling her “Susy, my Susyanna” (10). Simultaneously, Susan’s call for divine intervention echoes Susanna’s cry: “O everlasting God…thou knowest they have borne false witness against me, and, behold, I must die” (Chamberlin and Feldman 804). God does not directly intervene, instead “rais[ing] up the holy spirit of a young youth whose name was Daniel” (804). Doctorow’s text posits a similar situation where a trapped and helpless Susan calls for protection, her “last utterance function[ing] as an enigmatic ‘summons’ that Daniel cannot refuse” (Morgenstern 69). Like

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Caruth’s “voice of the other” through which we bear witness to our trauma, Susan’s summons articulates a traumatic inheritance Daniel has heretofore not acknowledged, one reinforced by the BoS. As we have seen, the BoS is ostensibly a story about how a collective narrative erased the veridical event of Susanna’s innocence. The verdict itself rests on a refusal to listen to the victim and A-Daniel is called on to expose the falsehood of the collective narrative that has threatened Susanna’s life and honor. Similarly, D-Daniel’s visit to the sanitarium and Susan’s summons is a call to recover the impetus for her suicide attempt. What he comes to realize is that he had “long since given up rights in Susan’s welfare” (13). Indeed he goes so far as to acknowledge that “some of the force that propelled her razor was supplied by [him]” (29). Thus Daniel’s traumatic inheritance moves beyond his “survivor” status in relation to his parents to include his sister. The fact that he may have been complicit in her suicide attempt—as we will see in more depth, Daniel contributes to the collective narrative—means that any attempt to work through the trauma of his sister’s death will require him to recover her narrative, even if that requires pointing the blame at himself or rehashing his traumatic past.

Daniel’s Traumatic Inheritance Having married, had a child, and taken the name of his adoptive parents, Daniel has, to some degree, distanced himself from the legacy of his biological parents. This is not to suggest that Daniel does not suffer from the trauma of his parents’ execution. Certainly his abusive relationship towards his wife and child, his manic disposition, and even the willful repression of his past all point to the lingering damage the Isaacson executions have caused. At the very least, Daniel has gained critical distance from his past borne out in the alternating narrative styles. When Daniel narrates the biographical stories of his parents, his prose is fluid, elaborate, and meticulously self-conscious. The clarity of these moments starkly contrasts with the disparate, desperate narrative of the present day, which is a raw jumble of biographical information, historical referents, and self-accusations.5 The distinction is that Daniel has had time to articulate the trauma of his parents’ execution over fourteen years, a privilege he does not have in relating Susan’s story. Vickroy tells us that trauma writers tend to place their readers in “disoriented positions…through shifts in time, memory, affect, and consciousness” (28). Similarly, Daniel’s narrative in regards to his sister is marked by detachment from others (as in Daniel’s “blow up” at the Howard Johnson), fragmentary asides (as in his references to Bukharin), dissociation (wavering between first and third person), and flashbacks (the entire Isaacson narrative). Traumatized by his sister’s suicide attempt, Daniel must “get the picture” of Susan’s tragedy in order to find solace for himself. “Apart from leaving Daniel in a state of unresolved grief,” Detweiler tells us that Susan’s suicide attempt “leaves open the question of just why she took her life” (70). Daniel indicates

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as much when he acknowledges that Susan has died of a “failure of analysis” (302), an accusation that implies that his health reveals success where she has failed. To play the part of analyst he returns to the “stacks,” the derisive locus of inaction about which Susan harangued Daniel in the Christmas episode, in order to find Susan’s “unrepresentable” (Caruthian) trauma. He finds solace in the BoD’s justification of his “analyst” status, but this is quickly tempered by the implications of the BoS that reconfigure this dynamic. We might say that Daniel’s analysis of the BoS leads him to reconsider his relationship to his sister. Of course, Daniel’s position as analyst is problematized early on when he misremembers the few words that Susan offers in the sanitarium, confusing “goodbye” for “good boy.” But as Daniel narrates their relationship he compulsively returns to the imagery of protectionism that culminates in a move to become Susan’s legal guardian, a realignment of his previously assumed role. In the first extended image of Daniel and Susan’s childhood, the children are led by the vice-like grip of Jacob Ascher to a rally for their parents. The core of this scene, however, is not Paul and Rochelle—the images on the placards are referred to as their “parents” whom Daniel has thus far in the text identified as the Lewins—it is the relationship between Daniel and Susan that dominates the scene. As Ascher’s violent speed and grip begin to hurt Susan more and more, Daniel is the one to intervene, commenting “You’re hurting her arm, Mr. Ascher” (18). When she complains of having something in her eye, it is Daniel that “took his sister by the hand and led her into the doorway of a shoe store” where “they were protected from the wind” (19). The scene then features two moments of separation: first when Susan stops to rescue Daniel’s hat and next when the crowd hoists them over their heads and propels them towards the stage. In both instances, Daniel fights to regain some type of reassuring physical contact with Susan. To Daniel, she is “only a little girl” and despite the “unmistakable authority” of the speaker who separates them on the stage, “still they held hands” (22). This role is not necessarily self-assigned either. Rochelle praises him for “tak[ing] such good care of [his] baby sister” after Paul’s arrest (124). Similarly, Ascher confronts the two after Rochelle is jailed, telling them they must go live with their Aunt Frieda. Susan, assuming her mother has died, begins to grill Ascher, but Ascher looks to Daniel to keep her in line: “Daniel, I cannot go on explaining these things to her” he snaps (146). Ascher’s curtness prompts Susan to cry and Daniel consoles her, calmly explaining to Ascher that “she misses our mother and father” (146). When the children are eventually sent to the shelter, a move that Susan resists vehemently, the shelter’s psychologist seeks out Daniel to find ways to calm her. This is echoed in Daniel’s title to the episode: “Alone in the Cold War with Franny and Zooey” (161), a reference to J.D. Salinger’s novel in which the older brother (Zooey) must come to the rescue of the younger sister (Franny). In all three of these episodes, Daniel

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casts himself in the role of protector (a role, it should be added, that requires speaking on Susan’s behalf). This relationship changes after their parents are executed as they both cope in mutually exclusive ways. Vickroy suggests that trauma narratives that show “multiple accounts sometimes reinforce and sometimes challenge one another, illustrating...the potential for sharing and healing but also missed connections, as when traumatic reactions isolate individuals with similar experiences from one another” (27). Studying families who have lost (or will lose) family members to the death penalty, Susan Sharp states that it is common for “the family members of someone accused of a capital crime [to] become ‘vicarious offenders’” who “find themselves publicly shunned” (7). Sharp goes on to suggest that in order to deal with their public shunning as well as the trauma of losing a family member to state-sponsored execution, family members respond in one of three ways: withdrawal from the community, anger towards it (specifically the government), or by “joining” support networks (25). As noted, Daniel has certainly withdrawn from the Isaacson family name and thus circumvented the vicarious offender label. Susan, on the other hand, fiercely attaches herself to her heritage. “I’m not ashamed of the name,” she barks at Daniel. “I’m proud of who I am” (80). Joining the New Left’s revolutionary affiliates such as the Students for a Democratic Society and the Boston Resistance, Susan advocates tirelessly in the name of her parents in a manner she feels is the “proper assumption of their legacy” (79). Yet in spite of her advocacy, she is not heard, least of all by Daniel who felt she had grown “too bright, too loud, too hysterically self-occupied” (64). This disparity in responses is evident at the Lewins’ Christmas dinner five months prior to Susan’s suicide attempt, where she seeks Daniel’s support for the Isaacson Foundation, a brainchild of hers that would help support court costs for arrested revolutionaries. Daniel balks over the use of the Isaacson name, complaining “if you want to give your money away why not just do it, why do you have to put a family tag on it? Why do you have to advertise?” (80). Susan, conversely, wants Daniel’s participation because it would show “a unanimity of family feeling, a proper assumption of their legacy by the Isaacson children” (10). But Daniel cannot accept this legacy as she does and harangues Susan for “call[ing] her own mother and father the Isaacsons!” instead of the Lewins (79). Susan directs her response at her foster father: “My mother and father were murdered—why do you let [Daniel] sit here and do it again!” (82). Susan reads Daniel’s disavowal of the Isaacson name as a betrayal, a betrayal that she associates with those who condemned their parents. Susan says as much in her letter, which Daniel receives after returning to the Lewins’ home from the sanitarium:

I have been thinking about last Christmas. Of course I’m going ahead with my plans but that’s not the point. You couldn’t have come on that

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way unless you believe the Isaacsons are guilty. That’s what I didn’t want to understand at the time. You think they are guilty. It’s enough to take someone’s life away. Someday, Daniel, following your pathetic demons, you are going to disappear up your own asshole. To cover the time until then, I’m writing you out of my mind. You no longer exist. (77)

Susan’s note makes her own feelings on the matter abundantly clear, associating Daniel with those who have condemned their parents if not of espionage then of the collective narrative that has taken shape around the Isaacson name. Curiously, Susan does not refer to their parents as “mom” or “dad” or even by their first names: they are “the Isaacsons.” In light of her personal feelings towards her parents, it reads as a jab at Daniel; Susan is acknowledging that Daniel has accepted the collective narrative and only sees their parents as an impersonal image of “the Isaacsons.” But if Susan’s actions here are condemnatory rather than conciliatory, then we must rethink the intent of her summons: “They’re still fucking us. Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture.” While most critics (and Daniel himself) assume the “us” refers to Daniel and Susan as the last surviving Isaacsons, this does not seem entirely accurate in light of the fact that Daniel has been written out of her mind and so recently associated with the “they” who fuck. It seems more likely that the “us” Susan mentions is the Isaacsons excluding Daniel who has renounced his family name as of their last encounter. Of course, Susan does not write off Daniel completely. As the letter indicates, there is a delay before Daniel disappears up his own asshole: “Someday is not today” (77). The vague pronouns afford flexibility: Daniel can choose “they” or “us.” To choose “they” is to go back to New York with his wife and son and withdraw from the family again. To become an “us” is to reassume the Isaacson moniker and give voice to Susan’s trauma by clearing her (and the family’s) name. Such is the charge of the apocryphal Daniel, but more specifically for Doctorow’s Daniel, the demand of his grandmother who prophesied that Daniel would “reclaim [the Isaacsons] from defeat” and “exonerate [their] having lived and justify [their] suffering” (70). Tokarczyk rightly identifies this as a “survivor mission,” but it is his survival in light of Susan’s suicide attempt, not his status as a surviving Isaacson (7). Thus, Daniel’s inquiry into his parents’ story is less about determining their guilt or innocence per se than about fulfilling his Apocryphal role by protecting Susan. To do this, Daniel must challenge the collective narrative that has ostensibly appropriated the traumatic moment of their parents’ execution and must give voice to his sister.

“The silence of the starfish” Susan’s trauma seems much clearer to establish: she still has yet to work through the trauma of her parents’ execution. But more than this, Susan struggles to work past the collective narrative codified in the legal verdict

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and perpetuated by Daniel. Her effort to create the Isaacson Foundation is indicative of this desire to subvert the dominant historical account that repeats the trauma by erasing radicals from the record. Robert Lewin, her adoptive father, appropriately links the Foundation to both Susan’s physical and psychological health (155), reminding us of the traumatic repercussions these narratives have had over Susan. Dillon confirms this reading, suggesting that “like the Apocryphal Daniel and Susanna, Doctorow’s novel indicts the failure of laws, prejudice that overwhelms laws, and the irreparable influence of false authorities” (374). However, these narratives are not confined to the official legal record that deprived Susan of her parents; she comes across alternate versions of the collective narrative that are complicit in the erasure of her private trauma. This is evident in Susan’s relationship with the New Left and its most prominent member, Artie Sternlicht. While Sternlicht does not believe in the Isaacsons’ guilt, he certainly does not support the methodology of their legal defense. “Your folks didn’t know shit,” he tells Daniel. “The way they handled themselves at their trial was pathetic. I mean they played it by their rules. The government’s rules.…They blew the whole goddamn thing!” (151). For Sternlicht, the Isaacsons were simply a part of the established system, and Susan has difficulty convincing Sternlicht otherwise. Beyond Sternlicht, though, it is clear that Susan’s political resistance can never “speak” her trauma. Vickroy reminds us that “the social support of groups or movements that encourage bearing witness is essential for individual and group survival of trauma” (19), the absence of which can be caustic. Daniel describes the repercussions of the “official” institutional narrative for himself: “I live in constant and degrading relationship to the society that destroyed my mother and father.…Nothing I do will result in anything but an additional line in my file.…I am deprived of the chance of resisting my government” (72). Daniel goes on: “If I were to assassinate the President, the criminality of my family, its genetic criminality, would be established. There is nothing I can do, mild or extreme, that they cannot have planned for” (72). Daniel understands that he has been “deprived of the right to be dangerous” precisely because anything and everything is expected of him and if he “were to become publically militant Daniel Isaacson all their precautions would have been justified” (72). He can neither erase the government dossier, nor speak beyond the limits of the established narrative. But whereas Daniel withdrew from his family name and circumvented this issue up until Susan’s suicide attempt, Susan joined the New Left to find her voice and combat these narratives. But the Left, like Daniel, finds Susan to be “too bright, too loud, too hysterically self-occupied” to be heard. Susan’s silence in the public sphere is inscribed in the private sphere after her suicide attempt in the image of the “starfish” position that Susan stages on her bed in the sanitarium. Her body expands outward, demanding attention, yet remains utterly silent. “There are few silences deeper than the silence of the starfish” (207), Daniel tells us. But this has always been the problem:

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You don’t talk, you don’t reinforce their sense of you. All they have is my word. I remember your voice, but how can I expect them to remember your voice. You can’t write out voice. All I can say about your voice is that it is so familiar to me that I cannot perceive the world except with your voice framing the edges of my vision. It is on the horizon and under my feet. The world has always been washed in Susan’s voice.…It lies at the heart of the matter. (209)

According to Daniel, Susan’s failure is her inability to speak. We may read his blaming of Susan for her silence as the callous words of a brother who admits shortly thereafter that he would not be sad if she died, but the novel resists this reading. Daniel is principally concerned with Susan’s well-being and indeed his own. Daniel’s blame is directed at Susan, but the indictment is of Daniel’s own failure to protect her. Daniel links the realization of this blame through the image of the “heart,” a symbol of inheritance. Earlier, he imagines tracing an arrow in a medical textbook between pictures of his grandmother, mother, and Susan that “describes the progress of madness inherited through the heart” (71). If voice is the heart of the matter, and the heart is the locus of inheritance, then Daniel is on his way to solving his earlier question: “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH MY HEART?” (17). The answer is that, like Susan, Daniel has also been silenced by the collective narrative, a silence that repeats a trauma he had assumed he was over. Thus when Daniel spies on Susan in the starfish position, Daniel finally understands his mission: to speak the private trauma of their parents’ deaths to exonerate their family name. Daniel’s reanalysis of Susan’s summons is revealing:

THEY’RE STILL FUCKING US. She didn’t mean Paul and Rochelle. That’s what I would have meant. What she meant was first everyone else and now the Left. The Isaacsons are nothing to the New Left. And if they can’t make it with them who else is there? YOU GET THE PICTURE. GOODBYE, DANIEL. (153)

While Daniel focuses on the question of “who” is fucking them, Daniel’s reordering of Susan’s summons is problematic because it is a mishearing of Susan’s final words. He reorders sentences two and three to create a more coherent, fluid line: “They’re still fucking us. You get the picture. Goodbye, Daniel.” In doing so, however, Daniel irrevocably changes the meaning of the phrase. Read in Daniel’s language, Susan recognizes her own frailty and asks for Daniel to fill in the gaps of her language. She says that they’re still fucking us, but the vague pronouns provide no clues. In Daniel’s figuration of the phrase, this is the picture that he must get. In other words, Daniel is empowered with the knowledge to identify the pronouns. As such, Susan innocuously dismisses Daniel with a “goodbye.” However, read in Susan’s language (“They’re still fucking us. Goodbye, Daniel. You get the picture”),

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the unknown referents remain unknown and Susan empowers no one (directly) to decipher them. The “goodbye” becomes an abrupt dismissal, suggesting a lingering resentment that is inevitably paired with the first sentence (“They’re still fucking us”). While we might read the picture in the last sentence as an afterthought, a detached image, it might also be packed with the resentment of her goodbye: knowing that the picture that Daniel will inevitably find is the poster rolled up in the tube in her car that might be read as a final “dig” at Daniel for failing to answer the poster’s challenge to free the Isaacsons. Thus the poster becomes the principle image at stake in the novel. Earlier, Daniel is led to Sternlicht by the tube in Susan’s car that holds the “Save the Isaacsons” poster, the poster Sternlicht is reluctant to hang with his wall collage. Daniel’s newfound understanding is precisely the picture itself: Daniel must take up the cause and “free them” because “if they can’t make it with [the New Left] who else is there?” It is fitting then that, at the conclusion of the starfish episode, and Daniel’s last contact with Susan, he places a poster of “a grainy Daniel looking scruffy and militant” on the wall where Susan can see it (211). “His hand is raised, his fingers make the sign of peace” (211). Like his apocryphal counterpart, Daniel has accepted the summons to exonerate the Isaacsons and free both Susan and himself from their traumatic inheritance. Rallying in Washington, Daniel joins the other protestors in returning his draft card to the Justice Department. The next day Daniel marches on the Pentagon—symbolically associated by Robert Detweiler with Susan’s starfish position—is beaten, and arrested. While his night in jail is marked as a traumatic repetition of his parents’ incarceration, Daniel finds himself alone, “unable to share the bruised cheery fellowship of his companions…or feel this group-sing spirit” because he knows “how far they are from home” (256-57). At the same time that he finds himself cut off from the collective narrative he reasserts his connection with Susan. He interprets “the space between the bars” and discusses “each instant its theme, structure, diction and metaphor with her, with Starfish, my silent Starfish girl” (257). But ultimately, as Daniel intimated earlier, he has lost the right to be dangerous. “The next morning I paid my fine and was released. It was another lovely day” (257). Political activism will fail him just as it failed Susan.

“Learning how to be an Isaacson” The confused events surrounding Daniel’s last visit to Susan’s hospital room all point in the same direction: the acceptance of the apocryphal summons to narrate Susan’s trauma. After hearing about Susan being considered for electro-shock treatment, Daniel goes on a rampage in Dr. Duberstein’s office. In his “zeal,” he alerts Duberstein of his presence, but views it as an educational moment: “You see I was learning. I was learning how to be an Isaacson” (206-07). For Daniel, learning to be an Isaacson is tied to the protective and retributive impetus behind God’s decree in the Apocryphal text

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and Susan’s correlative summons: “He’ll get them all.” “At the same time,” Daniel states, “I initiated discussions with the Lewins with the end in mind of becoming Susan’s sole legal guardian” (207). Just as A-Daniel launches a cross-examination of the two elder judges, D-Daniel also launches his own legal investigation to determine Susan’s innocence. That the subject of the investigation is his parents is not important since proving them innocent would free Susan from the collective narrative that asserts their guilt. The switch to the legal posture coincides with a more formal, journalistic tone to the narrative, taking a different angle in the traumatic coping than the failed strategy of nostalgia and anger. “I have put down everything I can remember of their actions and conversations in this period prior to their arrests” Daniel laments. “Or I think I have. Sifted it through my hands. I find no clues either to their guilt or innocence. Perhaps they are neither guilty nor innocent” (130). The uncertainty propels Daniel into reinvestigating his parents’ case but his investigation meets the same resistance as Susan faced: alternate versions of the same collective narrative that speaks the guilt of his parents. Few people Daniel encounters believe in his parents’ guilt as defined by the court, but they maintain that the Isaacsons were guilty nonetheless. Jack Fein, the New York Times reporter, agreed that the Isaacsons “were framed, but that doesn’t mean they were innocent babes.” If nothing else, Fein suggests, “They acted guilty” (214). When Daniel approaches Jacob Ascher’s wife with the question of their innocence, she responds “They were not innocent of permitting themselves to be used. And of using other people in their fanaticism. Innocent. The case ruined Jacob’s health” (216). Amidst this tumult of voices, Daniel finds himself in the same isolated position he felt in his jail cell and feeling similar to Susan whose support network—Sternlicht and the New Left—also asserted the dominant collective narrative. Daniel recognizes this when he goes to speak with Fein. “I’m laying the Foundation on him and he wants to talk to the responsible adults. It occurs to me that I am dealing with a professional. The son of Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, who were executed a dozen years ago for crimes against the nation, has established a Foundation to clear their name” (213). Daniel realizes that the story is being written to fit a particular mold. He recalls a moment from his childhood when “Susan and I held candles in our hands and rested our foreheads on the White House fence. That is a famous news picture. It appears as if we’re looking through prison bars” (253). Here too the image is decontextualized and co-opted to “fit.” The rally scene discussed earlier reduces Paul and Rochelle to posters and Daniel and Susan to generalized “victims” of political persecution: images of suffering, individuals without stories. Geoffrey Harpham tells us that such images “are delicate and murderous, that they are modes of liberation and torture” (83). “Any narrator concerned to write a factual account would worry about them” because they have an “uncertain relationship to the narrative that binds them” (83).

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Harpham’s “images” resonate with Felman’s trials, suggesting that they both decontextualize narrative and “thus [repeat] the trauma” (Felman 5). Meeting with Robert, Daniel realizes that Ascher himself recognized the potential traumatizing repercussions of such collective narratives. In a letter to Robert, Ascher described the logic of the state that ties the Isaacsons to the Kremlin. “They are held to account for the Soviet Union. They are held to account for the condition of the world today. And all the indictment states is that they met with Mindish in the kitchen of their own house” (205). He insists on focusing on the specifics of the Isaacson trial despite his own clients’ attention to the collective narratives taking shape. (Paul views it as a Jewish lynching [197] and Rochelle describes it as a collective ritual [202].) Similarly, Robert tells Daniel that “[l]ong before their trial the Isaacsons were tried and found guilty in the newspapers” (221). Robert’s solution was to “to prove the Isaacsons innocent by proving Mindish innocent” (224). Rather than discrediting the principle witness against the Isaacsons (Mindish), Robert’s strategy was to challenge the collective narrative that associated all foreigners with communism. Daniel flies out to confront Mindish in the hopes of finding a final exoneration, but he only finds guilt. The now-senile old man spends his days riding the Mad Hatter’s Teacup ride in Disneyland. When he finally approaches the one man he blamed for his parents’ plight, Daniel identifies himself as an Isaacson: “Hello, Mr. Mindish. I’m Daniel Isaacson. I’m Paul and Rochelle’s son” (293). Daniel watches as Mindish is “restored to life” (293). “In wonder he raised his large, clumsy hand and touched the side of my face. He found the back of my neck and pulled me forward and leaned toward me and touched the top of my head with his palsied lips” (293). Detweiler associates this with a biblical “patriarchal kiss” that “is also a Judas kiss, the kiss of the betrayer” (75). But the apocryphal text suggests that Mindish stands in not for Judas, but the condemnatory elders, dramatizing a laying on of hands that interminably mark Daniel to his namesake. In this moment, Daniel does not just hear Susan, he metaphorically becomes her. Daniel implies as much in the paragraph immediately following as he describes a series of failed heart transplants. As we have seen, for Daniel the heart is symbolic of inheritance and voice, both of which Daniel assumes in his confrontation with Mindish. But Daniel also acknowledges that “heart rejection is a problem. The body attacks its own new heart as it would any foreign object. The heart is attacked by the body’s antibodies. It is destroyed” (293). The transplant imagery suggests a visceral “passing on” of Susan’s heart, even if there is the risk that he, too, will die as a result. “Seal the book” That Daniel understands this moment, indeed his whole survivor mission, as a religious journey is evident in the narration of his parents’ execution. Daniel states that, after dismissing the rabbi from the execution room, Rochelle

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“called after him: ‘Let my son be bar mitzvahed today. Let our death be his bar mitzvah’” (298). Rochelle’s plea is a dramatic summons, one entirely imagined by Daniel. The rabbi does not hear the comment and thus we can assume Daniel did not become a bar mitzvah that day. Daniel’s narrative revision, however, retells the story teleologically: his parents’ deaths explain the religious journey that has led him to Susan’s funeral. The juxtaposition of the two funerals—one for his parents in 1953 and the other in the present for his sister—drives this link home. At Susan’s grave Daniel finds himself waxing poetic on the “city for the dead” (301). Lost in an analytic reverie, Daniel is called into action when the time comes to refill the graves. He runs around the cemetery, hiring the wandering Jewish “shamuses” to say prayers not just for Susan, but “for [his] mother and father. Isaacson. Pinchas. Rachele. Susele. For all of them” (302). Rather than the biblical role of passive analyst, Daniel reasserts his apocryphal responsibility. As such, Daniel seems to be on the mend: “I hold my wife’s hand. And I think I am going to be able to cry” (302). It should be said, of course, that despite Daniel’s apparent success, what gains he makes are not conclusive. Though Daniel is finally able to cry, trauma is not something one simply “gets over.” LaCapra suggests that trauma “may not be cured but only lived with in various ways. Nor may it be reduced to a dated historical event or derived from one” (84). That Daniel has inherited or usurped or worked through the aporetic moment of Susan’s trauma does not inhere healing. Narratives, as we have seen, can also be damaging, particularly if they concretize and suppress further growth. Caruth suggests something similar when she argues that trauma “cannot be reduced…to a simple mastery of facts and cannot be located in a simple knowledge or cognition, a knowledge that can see and situate precisely where the trauma lies” (111). To the extent that trauma is incomprehensible, any attempt to define it is potentially problematic. Daniel seems to recognize this potential in the imagery of heart transplant rejection. And even if trauma is comprehendible, Leys tells us that the veracity of the traumatic narrative would be suspect. This is particularly the case with Daniel’s attempts to narrate Susan’s trauma through his own trauma. Even if Daniel’s intentions are good, Vickroy reminds us that “no reader can apprehend trauma completely through narrative. Trauma narratives acknowledge ambivalence and doubts about successful retelling, but they also attempt to provide possible ways for traumatic experience to be re-created” (Vickroy 11). At best, Daniel has provided one possible recreation of Susan’s (and his own) trauma. Daniel’s limitations call attention to the challenges facing trauma studies’ explanation of the intricate matrices of traumatic inheritance—both horizontally across populations and vertically across generations. Caruth tells us that trauma is tied up with the voice of the other but the precise implications of this are only now being explored in contemporary work on collective narratives (specifically cultural trauma). As Felman’s work indicates, there is

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a point of convergence between trauma and collective narrative and one of those places seems to be the criminal justice system. The ability for trials to repeat and generate trauma, but also affirm and salve, points to trial as a critical crossroads in trauma theory. Roger Luckhurst has shown how trauma theory has always been intimately tied to the courts, primarily for insurance purposes (23). But underlying the financial importance is the importance of community for healing. Courts do not administer justice, they codify narratives that can be detrimental to our psychological and social health. In the early history of trauma studies, trauma victims were publically ostracized when the condition was associated with hysteria, which equated it “with a shameful, effeminate disorder, often dismissed as a form of disease imitation…or malingering” (23). This type of resistance exists today in those who would deny the existence of PTSD to returning soldiers or victims of Hurricane Katrina in spite of its codification in the DSM-IV. Vickroy warns us of such dismissal: “collective repression and suppression may bring temporary comfort but carry their own destructive costs: further victimization, lost human connections, and unresolved anguish” (4). Traumatic healing always inheres some form of social recognition, and the sweeping cultural narratives that discredit victims as “crazy” operate in opposition to this healing process. Trials, Felman tells us, offer hope in that they can also successfully fail insofar as they generate their own “speaking power.” If this is the case, we must consider that it is always mediated. Just as Daniel filters Susan’s narrative—or A-Daniel speaks for Susanna—the courts are a further remove. Particularly in trauma cases, very little can be generalized. This is why the DSM-IV’s entry for PTSD describes a syndrome, a loose constellation of symptoms that may or may not be indicative of a trauma; in other words, the devil is in the details. This is precisely the lesson of the BoS where Daniel indicts the elders on a technicality—a minor inconsistency in their narratives. Such minutiae inevitably fail to thrive in collective narratives that are conformist in nature. This is particularly true of the stultifying cultural condition of the 1950s as well as the counter-cultural revolutions of the 1960s. This is evident when the protestors “liberate” Daniel by force in the Columbia library, implying the threat of collective narratives even within counter-culture. The threat to the individual is evident in Daniel’s last biblical invocation to “Go thy way Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end,” a decree that seems to close down narrative and, in turn, healing (303). But we might also read this ending as a call away from analysis, towards action. The BoS provides hope in that the “necessary failure” of the trial has granted A-Daniel “speaking power” and “great reputation.” In turn, if Doctorow’s novel is to provide speaking power to the Isaacson/Rosenberg trial, it is a call to understand these trials as failures and explore precisely what that might mean.

PURDUE UNIVERSITY

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NOTES

1 For Caruth, trauma is a condition in which an overwhelming event is not processed by the mind (an “unclaimed experience”) causing a literal, mimetic repetition of the overwhelming event in the present. The patient is convinced that he or she is experiencing that moment again. 2 Because there are multiple Daniels, when it is unclear I will identify Doctorow’s as “D-Daniel,” the Bible’s as “B-Daniel,” and the Apocrypha’s as “A-Daniel.” 3 Despite Michael and Robert Meeropol’s efforts to exonerate their parents, there appears to be no documented evidence of a traumatic response. 4 While the Judeo-Christian tradition defines an apocryphal text as one that stands outside the canon, the term has had a variety of meanings. Though the original Greek derivation means “hide away,” another definition posits an apocrypha to be any text with an unknown or questionable author. Both definitions seem appropriate in that Daniel hides the apocryphal text from the reader and systematically casts dispersions on his narratorial authority throughout. It is important to note that various denominations, particularly Roman Catholics, Lutherans, and Eastern Orthodox, include the “Book of Susanna” as the thirteenth chapter in the canonical “Book of Daniel” (along with “Bel and the Dragon” as chapter 14). “Susanna” is certainly not considered a chapter in Daniel according to the Jewish Tanakh, nor is it considered an apocryphal text. However, it is also important to note that in spite of Daniel’s Jewish heritage, he is using a Christian text that considers the “Book of Daniel” as borderline canonical and the “Book of Susanna” as apocryphal. 5 Such a claim is certainly debatable, but moves beyond the scope of this paper. I do not aim to answer that question here, but I would like to acknowledge the difference between two brief moments: Daniel’s recollection of the Paul Robeson concert and Daniel’s second trip to see Susan in the sanitarium after he has been kicked out of the hospital. In the former, the flashback begins serenely: “It is Sunday, a warm Sunday morning in September. Everyone is up early. The phone is ringing” (43). Daniel is consistent with his narrative style, remains in the first person, present-tense. Daniel is highly analytical, removed from the scene (“I am in an intoxication of fear” he comments [50]), but controlled. The only break from the narrative is a nod to his narrative’s reconstruction efforts: “How do I know this? If I was crouched behind a seat, how do I remember this?” (51). Conversely, Daniel’s visit to the sanitarium begins with an intertextual biblical reference: “One day after a rain, a young man trying to interpret and analyze the awful visions of his head makes an ordinary visit to his sister in the sanitarium” (205). Jumping between first and third person usage and juxtaposing discordant images (“ordinary visit” to the “sanitarium”), Daniel is detached from reality. The subsequent narrative arc jumps back in time a week to his crazed attack on Duberstein’s office, then ahead to a conversation with his foster father before returning to the present. His images are metaphorical (“today Susan is a starfish” [207]), literary (“Leopold Bloom ate with relish…” [208]), sexual (“her legs spread” [207]), and metanarrational (“You know I’m not shittin’ you, man” [208]). The varying rhetorical strategies reflect his confusion of purpose in these moments.

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