Why does life

have to be so crazy sometimes? ...If it wasn't I'd be bored, yes, I know this, that's what I always tell my friends, and it might ease things if we talk things out, but it's so hard. But we sort of did, didn't we? Sort of.

I'm having a hard time getting through PF with the post-iting because the text is just so goddamn rich. I really think I could have written my whole thesis on it, but, as I've said before, I do think it will be better in the long run that I'm not.

I'm glad I've gotten this extension because I'm finally getting to the point where I know what I'm going to focus on (I'm ridiculous, I know this, and I also know that I would probably gotten to this point earlier if I had been working harder this whole time, yes). I'm going to discuss two cataclysmic events and how they are figured in each of the three novels. That's still pretty broad. Each of the events is portrayed in writing, that's important, essential in fact, because my point has to do with how they are recorded, how they are re-presented. In PF I'm going to focus on Shade's portrayal of his daughter's death (most likely suicide) and Kinbote's portrayal of Shade's murder (the latter is where I'm getting caught up because there are many angles I can take with this one, but I'll get to that in a second). In CC I'm going to mention the book Jonah is working on in the beginning of the novel but spend the majority of the section talking about the book he ends up writing, which is (as he portrays it) a direct result of the first. In WHALITC (which is not what I will be calling it in my thesis, don't worry), I will discuss Uncle Julian's work on a book about the day of the family murders, and then Merricat's narrative about the fire and all that.

In all three novels, the first event I've just mentioned is part of the larger narrative that constitutes the second event. If I was in the superimposing causality business I might say that the first event causes the second, but really it is the narrator of each novel that represents it that way.

The thing with PF and how Shade's murder is that it's almost a dead horse well beaten type of thing. Critics are pretty much in consensus that there is sufficient textual evidence that Kinbote has 'invented' the Gradus narrative (whether he 'invented' the Zembla/King Charles narrative or not, which is slightly more debatable), so perhaps what I should focus on is where these two chains of events coincide. For instance, and I can't find it now, but I feel like there was a section that juxtaposed Gradus's journey with the King's escape the year before. Perhaps they were in adjacent notes. I'll find it later. My point here is that I'm not concerned with the metaphysics of the novel, with how death is treated as a subject, though this is obviously linked to how the specific deaths are represented, or with whether or not what is presented as fact is factual - though what is explicitly contradicted by Kinbote is certainly important. This is the one I'm bogged down in.

Which means I need to devote more energy to the other two, and fast, because we're really close to the deadline now. I also have to finish reading the Derrida I want to include.

And I need to go to the grocery store, but it's cold outside. And it's cold inside, so I'm uncomfortable, and I am a grown woman and should stop whining and do something about it, huh? Let's do this.