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Spoiler Alert.
Extraordinary. Johannes' confessed "lie" is a literary device: writing the bulk of the novel more than a year after events transpired. I didn't care: a minor transgression, particularly where entire conversations, geographical paths, and internal events are recounted in such minute detail. So that can't really be "the lie." Instead, 'the lie' must have been about his posturing: one face to the community (schoolmaster, clerk, deacon) while inside roiled a man at odds. But we (readers) knew that at the beginning. So where is 'the lie?'
Johannes lays himself so bare to us throughout, I never questioned trusting him. The confession to the reader, even naming the reader "Nathan," creates remarkable intimacy. Nihilism and existentialism collide, and through it all, we find a man at peace with chosen his place in the world. There is no 'lie;' there is only a man who courts trouble and inter-personal complications while decrying them: a minor transgression (if even that) for growth and renewal.
I wish I had been schooled by Danes. Reading and discussing this work as a youngster would have been grand.
Extraordinary. Johannes' confessed "lie" is a literary device: writing the bulk of the novel more than a year after events transpired. I didn't care: a minor transgression, particularly where entire conversations, geographical paths, and internal events are recounted in such minute detail. So that can't really be "the lie." Instead, 'the lie' must have been about his posturing: one face to the community (schoolmaster, clerk, deacon) while inside roiled a man at odds. But we (readers) knew that at the beginning. So where is 'the lie?'
Johannes lays himself so bare to us throughout, I never questioned trusting him. The confession to the reader, even naming the reader "Nathan," creates remarkable intimacy. Nihilism and existentialism collide, and through it all, we find a man at peace with chosen his place in the world. There is no 'lie;' there is only a man who courts trouble and inter-personal complications while decrying them: a minor transgression (if even that) for growth and renewal.
I wish I had been schooled by Danes. Reading and discussing this work as a youngster would have been grand.