From: Jezzaroona
Category: Amis
Date: 7/16/99
Time: 12:23:19 PM
Remote Name: 195.44.205.249
Death for Love rather than the Death of Love. I think you've got something here - epsecially as you reference "the ending of the novel in which these [post-mod] "tricks" take over the narrative". I think it is totally significant that Samson moves from his narratorial territory within the framing sections to directly influencing the action within the final "chapters" of the novel. This is the kind of "ontological trangression" that occurs in Cortazar short stories with such spectacular results - usually fatal (see "The Continuity of Parks" or "The Night Face Up".
Now Samson is a literary novelist, a knowing novelist. He re-cycles Nabokov et al. Does he know that by choosing to "break the frame" he is commiting an act of metaleptic* kamikaze? He's dying anyway, he's being waiting to die since he was irradiated. The one positive thing he can do in his dead-end state of health is cross the narrative border and save Kim in exchange for his own life (he's on his way out anyway) as you suggest.
*Gerard Genette.
** Talking of anticipating armageddon, this follwoing piece form *Vineland* by Thomas Pynchon:
"Once or twice they nearly went over, but at last the Nomad scraped through a breach in the guardrail and gained the deserted highway. Every hundred feet or so, just off the shoulder, was a slender pole holding a medallion about the size of a party-size pizza, witha face on it...a particular human face , looking directly at the viewer with a strangely personal expression, as if just about to speak...Had they been meant somehow for the long jammed and crawling hours of flight from the City, something inspirational to look at, to assure them all in a way not immediately clear *it is not the end...there is still hope...*? was it only some travel game for the kids, to keep them occupied, to pass the time till the sudden light from behind, the unbearable sight in the mirror?"