They declare the author irrelevant the moment the text leaves their hands, that the reader's interpretation exists in isolation, belonging not to the author but to the reader alone. Yet they forget that who the author was—their beliefs, their biases, their culture—is precisely what shaped the text in the first place.

In truth, reading is an asynchronous conversation between the author and their readers, and meaning can only emerge from that conversation—and not from a monologue from either the author or the reader.

The catch, however, dates back to the moment in which some scholars disagreed about this matter—and later on their work was, as often happens, taken out of context and gleefully distorted by the internet.

It’s time to review our history.

“Death of the Author” is an essay published in 1967 by Roland Barthes.

Barthes (1915 - 1980) was a French literary critic and theorist. He famously wrote:

[…] the image of literature to be found in contemporary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his history, his tastes, his passions; criticism still consists, most of the time, in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of the man Baudelaire, Van Gogh's work his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice: the explanation of the work is always sought in the man who has produced it, as if, through the more or less transparent allegory of fiction, it was always finally the voice of one and the same person, the author, which delivered his "confidence."

And so the internet often reduces the above to the simplest explanation: the author’s intention when writing a book should be irrelevant once that book is published.

Except that Barthes wrote this essay in response to another essay (or, rather, in response to an entire school of thought) and thus taking his words out of context… does not yield the best interpretation.

That context dates back to 1946, when Wimsatt and Beardsley published an essay titled “The Intentional Fallacy”. They defined intention as the “design or plan in the author’s mind.” From there, the fallacy, in their view, lies not in the concept of intention itself, but in treating it as a recoverable standard for critical judgement:

The claim of the author's "intention" upon the critic's judgment has been challenged in a number of recent discussions […]. We argued that the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art. […]

…and the essay continues with Wimsatt and Beardsley attempting to argue that several critiques (or, in modern terms, “reviews”) of books that attempted to guess the author’s intention had no basis to reach any conclusion and, to some extent, gained no benefit from doing so.

“The Intentional Fallacy” took over in the United States from the 1940s to the 1970s—and towards the end of that period is when Barthes wrote his famous “Death of the Author” essay… which, granted, has a far more catchy title. This is why, nowadays, the proponents of the idea that authorial intention is irrelevant refer to it as death of the author.

That said, Barthes’s consider a nuance that Wimsatt and Beardsley did not quite address.

Read more

The short answer to what makes it alternate history is almost too simplistic:

Germany and Japan win the Second World War.

But the longer answer is where PKD’s political realism begins to shine. He speculates that Roosevelt was assassinated in 1934, making room for a successor who steered America towards isolationism—a decision that left the European allies without support and allowed Germany to cut through the continent unopposed. Likewise, such isolationism gave Japan the conditions to destroy Pearl Harbour and the American fleet.

What is remarkable, at a sociopolitical level, is that the novel never presents these alternate events in isolation. Events are discussed as sequences that unravel because of what came before, creating consequences that have steered this fictional world into a different New World: where Germany rules Europe and the east coast of USA, and Japan controls Australia, SEA, China, and USA’s west coast.

Of course, where frontiers have shifted, ideology has followed. The Nazis wield sufficient political power that anti-Jewish legislation is woven into the new world order—any Jew found in the open is detained and deported to the concentration camps. The ovens are mentioned several times, as is what occurs within them, though there are no explicit scenes. Nazi Germany has also “solved the African problem” (the novel’s own phrasing) which, as one might expect, refers to the mass genocide of the local population.

The Japanese, by contrast, occupy themselves with cultural appropriation—a theme that, without any attempt at subtlety, mirrors actual history: specifically, the fetishisation of Japanese and Oriental culture during the American occupation of Japan. Here, that dynamic is inverted. The Japanese collect Americana—such as art, dinnerware, weapons—from pre-occupation America, undertake the reconstruction of destroyed neighbourhoods, and hold particular views towards the stereotypical blonde woman. This last detail is, for the most part, conveyed obliquely, filtered through the thoughts of the novel’s male characters.

Against this backdrop, the novel follows multiple characters

Their stories begin in apparent isolation, connected only by the concerns and traditions of this new world.

Robert Childan, a merchant dealing in Americana, is attending to Japanese customers; Mr Tagomi, a senior functionary of the Trade Mission, is one of them—and one of the novel’s point-of-view voices. Frank Frink, a Jew, has just left his job as crafter of imitations—and while consulting the I Ching about his uncertain future finds he cannot stop thinking of his ex-wife, Juliana. She, in turn, lives in the neutral buffer territory between Nazi-occupied and Japanese-occupied America.

What draws these perspectives together is:

1. their detachment and/or resignation towards the current geopolitical situation (accompanied by a deep desire for a different world),

2. their involvement (whether voluntary or otherwise) with art, and

3. the ever-present role of the I Ching in their lives.

I cannot tackle all of these points in this essay-review without it becoming a book of its own. I will focus, therefore, mostly on the first.

The characters’ resignation and detachment is, in my view, the richest point of discussion.

Given the setting—and the level of sociopolitical realism and research on display—the author could have focused on the large scale... but he chose otherwise. I called this novel “social science fiction” at the outset because PKD took a far more personal approach, examining how these seemingly disparate characters internalise and navigate this alternate history.

Childan, the art dealer, is caught in what I would call ideological contradiction: he despises the Japanese occupation and resents their authority, yet actively courts the favour of high-ranking Japanese figures, seeking social proximity to advance his store’s reputation. In his own words:

Now, the Japanese on the other hand. I know them pretty well; I do business with them, after all, day in and day out. They are—let’s face it—Orientals. Yellow people. We whites have to bow to them because they hold the power. But we watch Germany; we see what can be done where whites have conquered, and it’s quite different.

But also:

If all business days were like this... but it was more than business, the success of his store. It was a chance to meet a young Japanese couple socially, on a basis of acceptance of him as a man rather than him as a yank or, at best, a tradesman who sold art objects.

Since this is among PKD’s more literary novels, Childan’s sections carry a distinctive prose style—one that subtly mimics the cadence and register of the Japanese characters he speaks with. Consider this excerpt:

“That recalls fine speech I heard by Doctor Goebbels,” Robert Childan said. “On radio, year or so ago. Much witty invective. Had audience in palm of hand, as usual. Ranged throughout gamut of emotionality. No doubt; with original Adolf Hitler out of things, Doctor Goebbels A-one Nazi speaker.”

“True,” both Paul and Betty Kasoura agreed, nodding.

“Doctor Goebbels also has fine children and wife,” Childan went on. “Very high-type individuals.”

Frink, perhaps the one whose mere existence is most at risk given fictional-Germany’s deportation legislation, seldom thinks about the danger he may face. Instead, he longs for his ex-wife, and later focuses on setting a handwrought jewellery business.

Towards the end of the book, the police apprehend Frink and he attempts to escape, but his weak resistance reads as cursory rather than desperate. To me, this was not a flaw, but an illustration of how totalising the anti-Jewish legislation had become, and how little individual resistance could matter within it. Frink seemed philosophically Stoic: accepting what would happen due to knowing his own future was out of his control.

There are other perspectives to consider—such as Mr Tagomi from the Trade Missions, and a recurrent character he meets with, Mr Baynes—but I want to move to someone else.

Juliana Frink is perhaps the most interesting character of all.

A modern reader may find her passive, easily deceived—a stereotype, even—since much of her plotline revolvers on the consequences of her poor choice of lover. And yet, thematically, her storyline is the richest in the novel.

She begins by performing stability: attempting to exist within the buffer territory while unconsciously disregarding all news of the world beyond. Then, without suspecting it, she becomes entangled with a Gestapo-style kommando sent to assassinate the actual man in the high castle—the largely absent figure who gives the novel its title, and is the author of an in-world banned bestseller that imagines yet another alternate history. One in which Britain and the United States win the war, but the world that emerges is markedly different from our own.

As she travels alongside this operative and reads the forbidden book, Juliana’s perception of the world she inhabits begins to shift. She stops mourning the present—or what America might have been—and moves, at last, into the future. To explain this, I need to discuss the book she is reading.

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is the in-world bestseller:

The fiction within the fiction, thematically echoing the nested, unstable realities that recur throughout PKD’s work. It is not as vertiginous as Ubik1 (where reality physically disintegrates and merges into another) but it achieves something similar through more theoretical means.

One can understand why the characters are drawn to it.

Abendsen is described as a compelling writer, and his premise is genuinely so: Britain and the United States win the war and turn towards humanitarian investment—imperfect, economically motivated, but utopian by comparison to the reality The Man in the High Castle presents. And yet, even within this more hopeful alternate history, a new war eventually emerges, because Britain chooses to go to war with the United States. As one character puts it:

“Human nature,” Joe added. “Nature of the states. Suspicion, fear, greed.”

What makes this devastating is that, through Tagomi’s storyline we learn that Nazi Germany was, all along, planning to move against Japan—driven by suspicion, fear, greed. The fictional reality of Grasshopper... mirrors the fictional reality of PKDs’s novel, and both, in turn, gesture towards the conditions that gave rise to the Cold War.

Juliana’s ending, through the use of I-Ching, attempts to bridge this to the reader. Given it pertains to the controversial ending of the book, I’ll warn the below section contains major spoilers.

Juliana manages to shake off the Gestapo-style kommando and travels—with mandatory stops to finish Grasshopper...—to visit Abendsen, its author. After a brief conversation, he reveals that he wrote the book while consulting the I-Ching, whereupon Juliana insists on putting the question directly to the Book of Changes:

Juliana said, :Oracle, why did you write The Grasshopper Lies Heavy? What are we supposed to learn?”

The answer is, at face value, disconcerting:

”It’s Chung Fu,” Juliana said. “Inner Truth. I know without using the chart, too. And I know what it means.”

Raising his head, [Abendsen] scrutinised her. He had now an almost savage expression. “It means, does it, that my book is true?”

“Yes,” she said.

With anger he said, “Germany and Japan lost the war?”

“Yes.”

It left me thinking, I will not deny it.

Was PKD looping back to our reality?

After much deliberation, I arrived at this conclusion: Grasshopper... is true, because the reasoning underlying its geopolitics is true. Every nation is a looser in a war, even when they settled the terms at the end, they lost—people, funding, time. Likewise, nations do not engage in humanitarian aid unless there is an economic benefit to them, and no matter how utopian the world they construct, or however harrowing the war that preceded it, they edge back towards conflict—because conflict is inseparable from humanity’s identity.

To close off…

A particularly strong point of this book is the idea that Philip K. Dick presented alternate history as a chain rather than a single divergence point. Within that context, the characters are thoroughly flawed and thoroughly human, their storylines apparently tangential yet woven together to illuminate the alternate world they inhabit—one that, unfortunately, remains timelessly relevant.

Unfortunately, rhythm-conscious prose is often mistaken for purple prose, as though a deliberate cadence could only come at the expense of clarity or substance. In reality, rhythm is another storytelling tool. It can shape mood, reinforce atmosphere, and even reveal the narrator's state of mind in a limited point of view.

Consider this sentence from Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer:

“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn't need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

Or this excerpt from Embassytown by China Miéville:

You’ll be able to say how the city is a pit and a hill and a standard and an animal that hunts and a vessel on the sea and the sea and how we are fish in it, not like the man who swims weekly with fish but the fish with which he swims, the water, the pool. I love you, you light me, warm me, you are suns.

Regardless of their length or style, those sentences have something in common: a quality that carries the reader forward, reinforcing the meaning of the text instead of distracting from it. That quality is rhythm—and it is not exclusive to literary fiction. Every genre can benefit from it.

Yet a flowing tempo is easier to demand than to achieve. It does not emerge from applying a single technique throughout a piece, but from combining several devices with intention.

Therefore, in this essay, we’ll look at two of the most versatile tools for shaping cadence: alliteration and assonance. We’ll begin with their traditional definitions and a few familiar examples before moving on to two unconventional examples—which combine these techniques with the perceived emotion of sounds to transform the prose’s cadence without ever drawing attention to themselves.

What is alliteration and assonance?

Both are literary devices, and both focus on the intentional repetition of sounds.

Alliteration focuses on repeated consonant sounds.

Where and how that repetition exists creates different types of alliterations. Let us review the three fundamental types:

The head rhyme (or initial rhyme) type.

This is the one we commonly encounter when searching for a definition of alliteration: “the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables”1 . Consider this example from The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

[…] he set the bag down and sat bent over with his arms crossed at his chest and coughed till he could cough no more.

In this case, McCarthy was repeating the sound /c/—the voiceless palatal plosive according to the IPA2. It is possible to argue that the choice of consonant for this alliteration is deliberate: as a voiceless sound, the /c/ creates a sound not too dissimilar to a cough itself—especially here: “and coughed till he could cough.” That resonance between the sound and what the sentence is describing makes the alliteration even more meaningful.

While the concept of alliteration does not require combining the meaning of the text with the sound’s ‘style’, doing so can yield some incredibly effective sentences.

Another type is symmetrical alliteration…

…which appears either as a chiasmus or as a parallelism; both of these are also rhetorical devices.

A chiasmus is the reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses without repetition of words. Think of this as a mirror—placed in the middle of a sentence—that only reflects the initial sounds of the words. A common example for this comes from a poem3:

By day the frolic, and the dance by night.

Notice the order of the sounds: b-d-th, and after the comma: th-d-b. That’s a chiasmus.

However, these are commonly confused with the other style of symmetrical alliteration—the one focused on parallelism. This is another rhetorical device that relies on “the use of matching sentence structure, phrases, or longer parts so as to balance ideas of equal importance”4. You have probably encountered it in famous speeches.

Consider the case of Winston Churchill’s famous speech regarding the Normandy landings of WW25:

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.

Here, the three-word structure “we shall fight” creates a rolling cadence that becomes more unavoidable the more it is repeated. However, if you look at the sounds there is something even more interesting here:

• “we” is a voiced sound, with the /w/ being a semi-vowel sound, and thus smooth and resonant by nature. And yet,

• “fight”—which is the last word of the parallelism—transcribes to IPA as /faɪt/, and ends with the sound /t/: a voiceless plosive also referred to as a “stop.”

Combining those two sounds yields a very interesting cadence that remarks the word “fight”—quite appropriate in the context of this speech. Here, the combination of the mechanics of sound (what our mouths and tongues do to generate the sound) plus the meaning of the words enhance the ‘feeling’ of the text as a whole, creating a very specific mood: in this case, that fighting was unavoidable, everything ‘ended’ in the fight.

Parallelism can also be used, to great effect in fiction.

In particular, the first example I used to open the essay—from Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer—is actually a symmetrical alliteration using parallelism:

“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be.

Look at the structure: “Ghost bird, do you X me?” where the X is first ‘love’ then ‘need’. It is the same principle as in the speech, but subtler because it is only used twice, in dialogue, and the sentence that comes after has a rhythm of its own—which complements the dialogue’s.

Finally, there is poetic alliteration.

…which, in reality, includes several ‘exceptions. In particular:

• The repetition of syllable-initial vowels functions as alliterations, even though it deviates from its original definition.

• Alliteration includes both word-initial consonants/vowels, but also stressed sounds. For example: “…dragging the lazy languid line along” counts the -long part of ‘along’ because of the stress. In this sense, non-stressed syllables will not alliterate.

Assonance, however, is a slightly more relaxed literary device.

It is the “relatively close juxtaposition of similar sounds, especially of vowels”6 that occur close together, either in terms of their vowel or consonant phonemes7.

For example, this from Blood Meridian—by Cormac McCarthy—features two assonances back-to-back:

[…] out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of […]

Because ‘fevered’ and ‘dream’ both use the long /iː/ sound, while ‘skins’, ‘silk’ and ‘finery’ use the short /ɪ/ sound. This could be considered as two overlapping assonance chains.

Both techniques have one characteristic in common

Though they are visible through the spelling of the words on the page, they both focus on the sounds used in those words. Therefore, words that are spelled slightly differently but read using the same sounds (as defined by IPA) will thus count towards an alliteration or an assonance. For example:

The City’s voice itself is soft like Solitude’s

…includes the ‘c’ of ‘city’ in the alliteration because the sound is similar to the ‘s’.

This is the case of the Blood Meridian example we saw above, where ‘e’ (from ‘fevered’) and ‘ea’ (from ‘dream’) yielded the same sound and, therefore, created an assonance.

With this, let us analyse an unconventional example.

I have two examples to show you, both from renown authors. For each case, I will introduce the excerpt, then break it down segment by segment to present the different techniques applied on each. We will analyse the repeated sounds, the choice of words, and how they combine to add meaning to the rhythm of the prose.

Read more

Some editors will strongly argue against anything that sounds like a description—especially if placed immediately after a character enters a room or sees themselves in a mirror. Others may not have a strong opinion unless every character description in the book follows the same pattern or order.

Regardless, we can indeed find a large variety of character descriptions. For example:

Roion was a tall, light-skinned man with a dark, well-trimmed beard. He was thinning on top. Like most of the others, he wore a short, open-fronted jacket, exposing the shirt underneath. Its red fabric poked out above the jacket’s collar.

…which was taken from Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings; as you noticed, it focused solely on appearances.

Here is another, and quite distinct, example:

Control’s father’s side of the family came originally from Central America, Hispanic and Indian; he had his father’s hands and black hair, his mother’s slight nose and height, a skin color somewhere in between. His paternal grandfather had died before Control was old enough to know him, but he had heard the epic stories. The man had sold clothespins door-to-door as a kid, in certain neighborhoods, and been a boxer in his twenties, not good enough to be a contender but good enough to be a paid opponent and take a beating.

…from Authority, by Jeff VanderMeer—where the narrating character describes himself at the same moment he’s reviewing his own family ties before considering how those brought him to where he now is.

While both styles are entirely valid, the more interesting question is not which description a reader prefers, but why the descriptions differ in the first place. The answer lies in narrative distance.

All in all, a first-person or limited third-person narrator should not describe another character—or even oneself—in the same tone than an omniscient narrator would. The reason for this is that the narrating character’s biases colour their opinion of the one they’re describing and so remove all neutrality from that description. In these cases, the text focuses on the impression the latter causes—or left—on the narrator.

Therefore, today I have one quirky example to discuss with you: an utterly biased, thoroughly opinionated description of a woman—the ex-wife of the male narrator. It is, admittedly, a contentious subtopic, but the example itself is well worth the analysis.

Yet before that, it’s worth revising two concepts:

Narrative distance and stream-of-consciousness narration.

In short, narrative distance refers to how close the reader feels to the mind of the character experiencing the story: detached and far away (as it happens in omniscient narrators) or close enough that the prose itself becomes affected by the character’s mental state—the case of third-person limited, or first-person narratives.

If you want a more detailed explanation, I wrote a separate essay on narrative distance in which I propose a framework for thinking about it:

On the other hand, stream-of-consciousness narration is a style applied only to closer narratives because it “tries to capture a character’s thought process in a realistic way”1. Consider your own interior monologue: the non-linear way in which you (we, all of us) ‘jump’ from one idea to another that seems barely connected, how we don’t quite shape proper sentences, how we linger in a word as if mentally stuttering. This fluency is precisely what stream-of-consciousness aims to replicate—a narrative that doesn’t focus on being tidy or legible, but psychologically truthful.

These two elements—a close narrative distance in third-person, and a stream-of-consciousness style—are fundamental pieces of the example I have for today.

Read more

If you've ever searched for an explanation of it, you have probably encountered endless articles mentioning the advice itself, yet with surprisingly little discussion of how it actually works.

The phrase is often presented as “a narrative technique”1—the singular doing rather a lot of work there—when in reality… it is not a technique at all. “Show, don’t tell” is an outcome: the cumulative effect of dozens of different choices made by the writer throughout a story.

Those choices operate across several interacting elements:

• the world on the page—be it a real-world setting or a secondary one.

• the characters’ identity.

• the choice of language, and

• the narrative style.

How do those four elements interact? Well:

World-building—the history, culture, social and political structures of a setting—bear down on characters because people do not exist in isolation from the contexts that formed them. World-building—its culture, beliefs, and languages—affects your choice of language. However, all three elements affect the narrative style because (a) characters affect narration in limited or first-person approaches, while (b) omniscient narrators take that influence directly from the world itself.

It's a messier chain-of-effects than most writing guides admit. Hence the diagram:

It’s because of the complex relationship between those four elements that explaining “show, don’t tell” is not an easy task.

An Index of “Show, Don’t Tell” Techniques per Interacting Elements

Therefore, below you’ll find an index of articles organised around the interactions of these four elements. Each article works through extremely detailed examples: line-by-line analyses of prose excerpts drawn from a wide range of published fiction, across decades and subgenres. Before presenting each, I will share a brief summary so that you know exactly what you’ll find.

Do keep in mind that this is a living document, and articles will be added as new pieces are published.

World-building & Language

Natural languages are organic: they are developed by a society and evolve alongside it in order to enable communication. The changes in the former, thus, drive the latter to create new words or alter the meaning of existing ones. For example, the word ‘telephone’ did not exist until it wasn’t needed; the Oxford Dictionary claims its first recorded use is of 18322… yet its subsequent shortening to ‘phone’ indicates commonality and familiarity.

A writer can appeal to neology—namely, made-up worlds—to “show, not tell”, though doing so can be a double-edged blade that adds complexity to the text. The following essay covers this topic and dissects some interesting examples (including how they are ‘taught’ to the reader):

In a similar vein, character’s names carry social hierarchies, tradition, genealogy, and more—and, as you can guess, their shape, sound, and length can be used to show (or rather, hint at) the setting’s history. The following essay includes a detailed process as applied by a writer:

World-building, Character, & Language

Anachronisms appear when a character uses a word that: (a) is too modern for the society they live in, (b) carries a strong connotation at odds with the character’s world and knowledge, or (c) is derived from a someone’s name—a ‘someone’ who may not have existed in the setting of the book.

Therefore, using the right words at every moment becomes paramount to show the influence of society in language, and of those in the character.

The below essay shows the above problematic by analysing a very specific excerpt: a character watching a ‘painting’ of a scene they do not have the right words to describe… though—by applying common sense—the reader should be able to infer what the character is seeing:

Character & Language

We are biased; all of us. Our age gives us a bias, literacy level, the career path we chose, the beliefs we hold and those that we left behind. Those biases can affect how a character communicates—which, in turn, can be used to show the character’s identity without explicitly describing it.

For example, a younger narrator—imagine: a toddler—will use simpler words, may even lack emotional language to truly understand what’s happening… but they’ll perceive events nonetheless, and it is in the dissonance between what the toddler-narrator says and what the adult-reader can infer that we can “show, not tell.” The below essay analyses a scene and provides guidelines:

Someone’s career path influences how they see the world. For example, while an architect may focus on the details of a room before paying attention to its occupants, a seamstress may only see the clothing but not the people wearing it. Granted, these are extreme examples, but the concept stands.

Thus, the essay below demonstrates—in limited narrators—how the description of a specific hallway can change depending on who’s crossing it: a military official, or a political strategist. They focus on different details, and interpret them according to their profession, thus showing their personality and interests.

Character & World-building

We all have opinions about the world we live in—and in limited or first-person narrators, that ‘inner monologue’ can be used to show details about the world. These details are, however, biased: limited to what the character thinks (which may not be entirely truthful) or knows (which may be incomplete or even wrong)… and so also—and indirectly—show the character’s beliefs.

First example: an analysis of a veteran’s inner monologue about the effects of war. You’ll notice that he makes highly biased statements that—regardless of how the reader may feel about them—communicate the state of the world:

What world-building details can be communicated through a character’s thoughts depend on the character’s understanding of the world. The veteran of the essay above has a very different view than a strategist.

That’s the case of the below example: where the inner monologue of a political strategist is used to show the geopolitical relationships of different nations across an entire fictional world.

Characters, Language & Narrative Style

Regarding more constant effects…

In first-person narratives—including framed narratives—the prose itself becomes a reflection of the character. Therefore, by altering the cadence, sentence structure, and choice of words, a writer can show the character's literacy and personality.

For example, we all avoid grammar and spelling mistakes… but an almost illiterate character who can barely hold a pen will should not be able to produce a neat and orderly prose. This is an extreme case, but the essay below analyses how this technique was used—to “show, don’t tell” a character’s intellectual development—in Flowers for Algernon:

Similar to the above, though most novels do not appeal to text formatting—except for italics for emphasis—it can indeed show a fundamental detail of the narrating character.

The below essay analyses a book in which strike-through text (like this) was used to show the thoughts that an emotionally abused person did not allowed herself to have. In particular, this narrating character did not have the means to understand her own refusal, and so the narrative (in first-person present-tense) could not explain it (tell it) to the reader:

Regarding temporal mental states…

In limited third-person and first-person narrators—often not in framed narratives—a temporal mental state will alter the shape of the prose. Think of anxiety, extreme fear (and the fight-flight response it induces), intoxication (alcohol, drugs), sexual drive (well, yes), depression, a traumatic flashback, exhaustion and sleep-deprivation, thirst and starvation…

Think of your own experience with, for example, deep exhaustion; you probably weren’t able to articulate your thoughts clearly, likely stammering over your words or making somewhat incoherent sentences. In such a case, your narrating character will not be able to narrate properly… and thus, you can show this temporal impediment through the shape of the prose.

For example, if they are overwhelmed or in a fight-flight response, punctuation—and the lack of thereof—can become an incredibly powerful tool to control reading speed and, therefore, transfer the character’s perception to the reader. This is the topic of the below essay:

Now think of the opposite case: extreme analytical focus in a high-stakes, life-or-death situation. The character should not be able to reason and instead merely experience what’s happening. This can translate into clipped prose stripped of articles, connectors, and contextually ‘unnecessary’ words:

Want to practice this? The below essay demonstrates uses a graphic novel’s panel as the base, and provides three examples of prose: purely telling, mixed, and purely showing:

Contrary to what most advice says, long sentences are not necessarily “bad”—especially if they are used to show a narrator’s mental state. The below essay covers three examples (distorted perception of time and ‘thinking out loud’ for limited narrators, and tonal influence for omniscient):

World-building & Narrative Style

Using an omniscient narrator does not necessarily imply a plain, factual voice. A deliberate choice of adjectives can keep the narrative far away from any character, while making a commentary on the world itself.

Thus, the below essay analyses Jorge Luis Borges used adjectives commonly applied to living things to inanimate objects to: (a) show how strange the setting was, and (b) generate a range of emotions on the reader, including dread:

You can find T.R. Napper’s books here: https://nappertime.com/

Other Relevant Episodes

I want to share some episodes you may be interested on checking out:

I did a cross-over episode discussing scarcity as presented in Dune and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—the book that inspired Blade Runner.

T.R. Napper is almost a regular in Books Undone. We did one interview focused on his award-winning novella Ghost of the Neon God, and also a group conversation about my favourite work of his: The Escher Man.

I also have a solo episode analysing the intersection of memory and identity in The Escher Man—and this one is spoiler-lite, so you can listen to it before reading the book:

And if you like written essays, I have two essays analysing excerpts from two books by T.R. Napper: Ghost of The Neon God and The Weight of The Air, The Weight of The World.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

This is an old book, published in 1884, and it does not fit neatly into modern-day publishing categories. Broadly speaking, it is an epistolary narrative—what we read is the main character’s own essay—set in the fictional world of Flatland: a place that is, as the name implies, flat and two-dimensional. The ‘humans’ of this world are 2D geometrical figures, and their shape determines every aspect of their social rules and structures.

Structurally, the book opens with a ‘foreword’ that is, in fact, part of the story: it is written by a fictional character, allegedly a friend of Square. After that, the first half of the book is Square’s attempt to explain how Flatlands works, dimensionally and socially. The second part recounts Square’s visit to Lineland (the realm of one dimension) and his encounter with a Sphere from Spaceland (the realm of three).

I want to focus on the element that interested me most: the satire of Victorian society and its accompanying social critique.

This satirical tone is already hinted at in the in-book prologue, where Square’s ‘friend’ tries—somewhat desperately—to dismiss accusations that Square is ‘derogatory towards women.’ (Spoiler: he absolutely. He’s also classist and ableist.) From then on, nearly every detail of Flatland’s social hierarchy can be read as a parallel to the real world.

A few examples:

• Figures range from Triangles (Isoceles as the lowest, Equilateral above them), to Squares, Pentagons, and so forth. Isoceles Triangles form the lowest class and are often policemen or enforcers. Equilateral Triangles are low-income workers, Squares are lawyers, Pentagons are physicians... and the closer a figure gets to a Circle (i.e., the more sides it has), the higher its social rank. Near-Circles are revered as High Priests. The society is rigidly stratified, as Victorian society was.

• Square looks significantly down upon the Isoceles, despite not being near the top of the hierarchy himself. To me, he reads as a caricature of the Victorian middle class: contemptuous of those ‘beneath’ him and irrelevant to those above.

• From Squares onwards, children have more sides than their parents; e.g., the son of a Square is a Pentagon, and his child is an Hexagon. For those Near-Circles, every child gets exponentially more sides. However, every generation of Triangle merely widens their angle a few degrees until, several generations down the road, one Square is born. To me, this critiqued social advancement: the better-off your parents are, the easier it is to ‘progress in life’ and the more you can achieve. Likewise, children of low-income workers are (due to the society itself) almost forbidden all progression; it requires far more more effort to move on from poverty, than among the ‘tiers’ of middle-class society.

• Women, regardless of class, are Straight Lines—the lowest of the low. (No pun intended... though there is, because this is a satire.) Their sole purpose is marriage and domestic labour, very much in keeping with the author’s contemporary society. Abbott devotes an entire chapter to legislation restricting women’s behaviour, while also explaining how women, in Flatlands, are nearly ‘invisible.’ The book is almost shockingly self-aware.

Square also explains that, by some divine mandate, all figures are meant to be Regular—having sides of equal length—and that Irregulars are criminals, degenerates, or addicts. The real-world parallel is obvious: Victorian society was not kind to people with disabilities.

There is so many more social critiques than I can cover here. Square is classist, sexist, and ableist—but his arguments are circular (pun intended). Even though he is ‘illuminated’ (and he is fond of saying) with Perspective after visiting Spaceland… he hasn’t quite acquired social perspective, and remains oblivious to the fact.

The mathematical speculation is equally compelling.

Abott asks whether other dimensions or realms of being do exist and whether we have the capacity to perceive them. He imagines what those dimensions would be, and how would they affect the 3D forms we take for granted. Socially, he also captures the intrinsic resistance such discoveries provoke—the denial, the accusations of heresy, and the institutional mechanisms that suppress inquiry.

Overall…

This is a quaint book, though for modern readers its archaic prose may feel dense. The satire is sharp but easy to miss, and if you don’t recognise it as satire, the book may come across as deeply offensive. Read with that lens, though, Flatland becomes not only a mathematical curiosity, but a surprisingly incisive critique of its time.

This review was originally published in GoodReads, on November 26th, 2025. It prompted a few posts of mine, which you may find interesting:

It also made it to my top reads of 2025:

If you are interested on reading it, Flatlands is part of the Guthenberg Project.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

It would appear as if nothing was there, nothing at all, as if the words wrote themselves, and then the Crawler would tremble into being and then wink out again, and all that remained constant was a suggestion of an arm and the impression of the words being written.

It’s from the final quarter of Annihilation, the award-winning novel by Jeff VanderMeer.

Is it long? Certainly. Meandering? Most definitely, but deliberately so: the narrator is trying to process a shocking experience, and the prose style reflects her disoriented mental state.

So: is the advice wrong?

I don’t think so, no. However, I’d argue this specific writing advice is often repeated without mentioning the caveats it relies on: audience, genre, and narrative distance.

That audience and genre affect a reader’s preference should surprise no one.

Consider the audience. In a story aimed at middle-grade readers, the prose must strike a very particular balance between (a) matching the literacy level of its audience and (b) still encouraging them to grow as readers. Most sentences should therefore be accessible, though some may offer a mild challenge; this can be either because of the sentence structure or the words used.

However, those same short, straightforward sentences may not suit a different audience. In literary fiction aimed at adults, for example, these may be perceived as simplistic—or, worse, as poor prose. The judgement comes due to a mismatch between what the book offers and what the audience prefers.

Something similar happens with regard to the book’s genre.

Just as each genre prefers different themes and plot structures, they also prefer different writing styles. Readers of epic fantasy, for example, may find long sentences exhausting, while readers of psychological horror may appreciate the sense of mental spiralling or suffocating immersion created by the shape of the prose itself.

Yet there is another element that is often omitted when repeating this advice: narrative distance can affect sentence structure—and this is precisely why that excerpt from Annihilation works.

This is what I will explore in this essay: why long, winding sentences may be appropriate when the narrative distance is small or non-existent. To this effect, I will analyse excerpts from famous writers—including Cormac McCarthy, Gene Wolfe, Philip K. Dick, and Jorge Luis Borges. For each, we’ll aim to understand the possible reasons as to why they were used, and the effect it has.

Read more

It’s the same point of interest, but your compositions evoke different moods and reactions. They capture different perspectives of the same moment.

This is exactly how narrators interact with characters in a story. Here, if your character is the subject, the narrator is the camera following them:

• Pull the camera back far enough, and you’ll capture everyone’s movement—but their facial expressions will be less detailed because distance smooths out details. This is what an omniscient narrative does: it trades depth for breadth.

• Instead, if you push it close—and place it in the character’s shoulder—your camera will see only what the character sees. If they’re running, the shot judders, but if they’re still, the shot may seem frozen. If there’s a microphone, you may even hear their jagged breathing, and the noise may blur everything else. This is what a limited narrator does: it trades breadth for depth.

• In other cases, though, a writer may hand off the camera to the character and let them handle the storytelling. This is what first-person and framed narratives do: offer only depth… and a biased one at that.

This interaction between the camera (the narrator) and the subject (the character) represents something known as narrative distance. Narrative distance, in turn, affects what is presented to the reader and how.

This is the first part of a three-part series.

Therefore, today we’ll focus on the effects of that distance: how much the character influences the narrative, what trade-offs there are, and where unreliability and bias come into play in limited or framed narratives. The following parts will focus on the effects of unreliability (namely, unreliability as a “lens”), and some interesting rule-breaking… because let’s be honest, if you have a good enough reason, every writing ‘rule’ can be broken.

Narrative Distance | Unreliability | Breaking The Rules

That said, and as usual, I will offer detailed examples from different books, with a focus on speculative fiction.

Read more

Within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. […] He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

This stark quote gestures towards an uncomfortable truth: in a world stripped of society, where each person stands alone and violence is abundant, can morality even exist? It is not an easy question to answer, yet however we do it we cannot escape the weight of our own judgement—for even in the absence of law and order, we remain our own harshest tribunal. As another book indicated:

I was embarrassed by the man and his fear, shamed by him, as though I myself were the coward, not him.

This raises an interesting question: is morality something we do, or something we tell ourselves we’ve done? It’s too early to answer that, so for now, I’ll just say this: the two books we’re about to explore work over the same philosophical framework to study morality from different points of view.

Let’s get these books undone.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Books Undone. I’m your host, Livia J. Elliot, and in today’s episode I want to analyse two unlikely books. Both are considered masterpieces: one won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and the other is part of an ouvre often referred to as having “redefined the meaning and scope of literature”1.

I’m talking about The Road by Cormac McCarthy (published in 2006), and The Shape of The Sword by Jorge Luis Borges (published in 1942).

Yet before we dive in, allow me to make some clarifications:

1. Today’s discussion will be more meaningful if you have read both stories. However, this episode will walk you through the setting, the characters, and part of the plot needed to follow my philosophising… making it spoiler heavy. That said, if you haven’t read The Shape of The Sword I strongly encourage you to pause here and read it—this is a short story, barely 8-pages long, and it will blow your mind.

2. What follows is an interpretation, not a verdict. You may disagree, and that strengthens the thematic richness of these stories—which continue to invite discussions decades after publication.

3. Finally, remember that you’ll be able to find all the links to the citations I’m using in my Substack, at booksundone.com.

In these books, the settings are not mere backdrops.

They are fundamental enablers of the thematic angle we want to explore.

The Road, by Cormac McCarthy is set in the future…

—in some unspecified year, somewhere in what once was the United States, in what is often defined as a post-apocalyptic landscape. Unclear? Deliberately so. Throughout the story, we are given only oblique clues as to what actually occurred. These appear as brief flashback scenes, scattered through the opening quarter—such as this:

The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a series of low concussions. He got up and went to the window. What it is? she said. He didnt answer. He went into the bathroom and threw the lightswitch but the power was already gone. A dull rose glow in the windowglass. […] What is it? she said. What is happening?
I dont know.

We can assume the ‘glow’ the narrator described was a bomb—nuclear, perhaps—or an electromagnetic pulse—an EMP—given its apparent effect on electrical systems. A follow-up fragment tells us a bit more, implying something:

They sat at the window and ate in their robes by candlelight a midnight supper and watched distant cities burn. […] Beyond the window just the gathering cold, the fires on the horizon.

But who is attacking? Why is this bombarding happening? The book does not provide an answer. After all, the narrator seems to be an ordinary citizen, and it is quite plausible he would not have enough information to explain what happened… or, perhaps, this lack of details could be hinting at something bleaker: the government was utterly destroyed along with the societal identity it imposed. In such a case, the reasons for the war and the nations involved do not matter, only the consequences.

Those consequences are key to this discussion. Consider the following excerpt; it seems to be a conversation between the man (the narrator) and his wife, likely months after the event at 1:17am:

We’re survivors he told her across the flame of the lamp.
Survivors? she said.
Yes.
What in God’s name are you taking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film. […] She watched him across the small flame. We used to talk about death, she said. We dont any more. Why is that?
I dont know.
It’s because it’s here. There’s nothing left to talk about.

The wife’s perspective here goes beyond mere pessimism. The key line is: “We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film.” The reference is telling.

Post-apocalyptic fiction—whether in film, literature, or games—tends to follow a familiar logic: a catastrophic event disables technology, fractures government (local, global, or both), and in so doing dissolves the structures that sustain social order. What remains is not simply hardship, but a reversion to survival governed by force rather than norms.

Her comparison to a “horror film” is subjective, but may also signal how she interprets the world around her: not as a damaged society, but as one in which the very conditions for society no longer hold.

This reading aligns with a well-established body of research: law enforcement and civic norms play a measurable role in reducing violence. As Isaac Ehrlich argued, “law enforcement—the apprehension and punishment of law breakers—serves partly as a means of deterring future crimes”. More recent research has extended this idea, identifying that social norms are “an important factor in curtailing antisocial behavior.” In other words, how individuals think and behave about violence matters as much as formal enforcement2. Remember this; we will come back to it as the podcast episode develops.

That said, here’s where the comparison to a “horror film” takes another dimension: in the wife’s eyes, the post-war world has become a landscape of unimaginable, ever-present violence. So much that ‘death’—or, more precisely, the threat of being denied death and forced to endure violence—is now a possibility they constantly live alongside.

Within this setting, it is easy to assume that morality cannot exist… but The Road will challenge that assumption. Before that happens, let us review:

The setting of The Shape of The Sword, by Jorge Luis Borges.

This is a fictional story, but Borges often relied on real elements—such as historical events, places, or even people—to frame his fictional plots. Thus, and unlike The Road, this short-story is set in the past and grounded in real history. It has two temporal lines:

• The present storyline is set in the northern departments of Uruguay, around the late-30s or early-40s. This was contemporaneous to the time it was written.

• The past storyline is set overseas, during one very real independence war. The character narrating this storyline introduces it as follows:

In 1922, in one of the cities of Connaught3, I was one of the many young men who were conspiring to win Ireland’s independence. […] We were Republicans and Catholics; we were, I suspect, romantics. For us, Ireland was not just the utopian future and the unbearable present; it was bitter yet loving mythology […].

Allow me to briefly review history with you.

In the lead to 1922 Ireland split into two camps over the Anglo-Irish Treaty:

• supporters (who agreed with the new Irish Free State), and

• deterrents who rejected it as a betrayal of the Republic declared in 1916.

This disagreement led to the Civil War the narrators obliquely referenced. At the beginning, this conflict first involved conventional warfare, where the pro-Treaty National Army gradually captured key urban centers, including Dublin… but a number of defeats made anti-Treaty fighters shift to guerrilla warfare4.

It is roughly in this point, during the early guerrilla phase, that the story is set. It is also worth noting that, while The Road presents us a world without society, The Shape of The Sword is set in a society under extreme duress. Though the Irish Civil War had lower civilian deaths than other equivalents, the fighting disrupted daily life, damaged property and local trade. Both sides used reprisals—namely, attacking homes and property of the opposite side—while the government executed prisoners, intensifying the cycle of violence. One narrator in this short story explicitly references this:

Of my companions there, […] one, the best of us all, was shot at dawn in the courtyard of a prison, executed by men filled with dreams. Others (and not the least fortunate, either) met their fate in the anonymous, virtually secret battles of the civil war.

Within this setting, this short story prepares itself to evaluate something more personal: how beliefs—and their changes—can affect someone’s moral stance. It is an interesting proposition, complementary to where The Road will lead us.

Thus, it is time we discuss…

The effects of the settings on the leading characters.

They are a consequence of the book’s world-building, and thus fundamental to the moral dilemmas we’ll see emerge.

The Road follows two characters:

The man and the boy, father and son, moving south through the abandoned roads. Their goal is simple: to find shelter in warmer lands.

Their ages are unclear; I personally assumed the father to be in his early forties and the boy somewhere between five and seven, though the text gives nothing to confirm it. Likewise, at no point are their names revealed, and even when the narrator appears to be limited to the father’s perspective, he thinks of his son simply as “the boy”, and of his late wife as “she.”

This is more than an authorial quirk, and it’s related to the lack of geographical and societal names in the book.

We know that names are more than just an identification—they’re tied to our identity. A person’s name is widely seen as a marker of selfhood, shaping self-acceptance and even acting as the ‘ultimate control element’ over memory5. Furthermore, geographical names—like those of cities, regions, and nations—are fundamental to preserve cultural heritage, contributing to identity by strengthening someone’s bond with that place and everything it represents6. Therefore, to strip someone of their name, and to strip a society of its names, is to erode something fundamental about who they are: their identity, their goals, their purposes.

This is how the book deals with an uncomfortable idea: what purpose does a name tied to the past serve? What point is there in remembering a life that will not return?

It is a nihilistic worry, but it haunts the man:

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. […] He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. […] What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

That collapse of identity—personal, civic, civilisational—is the same collapse that dissolved the norms and institutions that once kept violence in check, and ensured that the basic conditions for life were met: shelter, food, medicine, clothing. The fact that you can walk into a supermarket today and purchase food is possible only because countless institutions enable it: government bodies regulating trade, companies farming, processing, distributing, supplying. Remove all of that, and both other survivors and the environment itself become a threat.

However, regardless of the collapse, some self-imposed duties, attitudes, and beliefs that were part of the father’s identity before the world became post-apocalyptic, continue to be part of him. This translates into two behaviours we see repeatedly in the book; both are also tied to the lack of government and the new conditions of life:

1. protect his child from that latent threat of violence caused by other people—what we discussed before in the setting’s introduction—and

2. find the resources they need to keep moving. As you know, without food the body grows vulnerable, without proper clothing you risk sickness, and without medicine almost any ailment becomes a death sentence, especially in this post-apocalyptic setting.

Thus, the father faces a constant, impossible balance: staying safe (where meals are poorer and clothing insufficient) or venturing out to find supplies in places that may put the boy in danger. Either choice has consequences. Consider this scene:

What if there’s someone here, Papa? […]
We’ve got to find something to eat. We have no choice. […]
They stood in the doorway. Piled in a windrow in one corner of the room was a great heap of clothing. […] He would have ample time later to think about that. The boy hung to his hand. He was terrified. […] In the yard, there was an old iron harrow propped up on piers of stacked brick and someone had wedged between the rails of it a forty gallon castiron cauldron […] All these things he saw and did not see.

That search in that house did not end well. They end up finding mutilated people in the basement, enslaved by a handful of cannibals… of course, these leads to a chase in which the man has to consider the impossible: killing the boy before he’s captured. There are other encounters like this: armed men that attack them in the open using the boy as a shield, having to hide from slavers, and escaping survivors who want to kill them for their supplies. The father and son make it alive, but the cost of these encounters is more than physical. Listen to how the father speaks of his own role:

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man’s brains out of his hair. That is my job. Then he wrapped him in the blanket and carried him to the fire.

What you’re seeing here is the outset of something called moral injury.

As Griffin et al. explained, “individuals who are exposed to traumatic events that violate their moral values may experience severe distress and functional impairments known as moral injuries.” Meanwhile, Shay et al. also established that “moral injury is present when there has been (a) a betrayal of ‘what’s right’; (b) either by a person in legitimate authority, or by one’s self […]; (c) in a high-stakes situation.”7

We can see all of this in the father:

• (a) to him, ‘what is right’ is to protect his son and provide for him, but

• (b) he endangered the boy (even if to increase their chances of survival), which led the father to consider mercy-killing his son to spare him from suffering—something that contradicts these beliefs—because

• (c) they live in a high-stakes situation that demands these actions.

What we must understand is that a moral injury represents the damage done to someone’s identity and principles, caused by acting against your own values, or witnessing others doing so without being able to reconcile it.

Here’s where something emerges, and to understand it I’ll give you a practical example. You’re cooking, the stove is on, and you touch it with your bare fingers—it’ll hurt you, yes, but the next time you’ll try to protect yourself by using a kitchen towel. This type of protective reaction is not exclusive to physical health, for we often do things to protect our state of mind. Therefore—and perhaps only instinctively aware of what was happening to him—the father slowly begins to develop a new ethical behaviour to somewhat ‘prevent’ his moral injury from worsening.

This prevention comes in the shape of two so-called ‘catchphrases’ that will repeat themselves throughout the book. After their first dangerous encounter, where the boy was almost taken, the father tells him this:

You wanted to know what the bad guys looked like. Now you know. It may happen again. My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God. I will kill anyone who touches you. Do you understand?
Yes.
He sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.
Yes. We’re still the good guys.

Then this:

We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we?
No. Of course not.
[…] Because we’re the good guys.
Yes.
And we’re carrying the fire.
And we’re carrying the fire. Yes.

Notice the two phrases: “We’re the good guys”, and “We’re carrying the fire.” At a first glance, the first one reads as reassurance of their ethics, and the second like a religious or faithful comment… but they are so much more. They represent a pattern that psychology can help us decode.

In 1986, researchers Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski developed something called terror management theory. TMT posits that someone manages their terror of death by developing and maintaining cultural worldviews: humanly constructed beliefs about reality, shared among individuals, that minimise existential dread by conferring meaning8. Existential dread encompasses the overwhelming anxiety and despair someone experiences when confronting life’s fundamental questions about purpose, mortality, and the human condition—and we have seen that this setting has entirely eroded those three elements:

• There is no identity left—something we see reflected in the lack of names. As the father thought before: “Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world.” Therefore, every purpose and meaning he may have developed in the world from before are now irrelevant.

• Mortality, as we discussed when I introduced the setting, is too close for comfort. As the wife said: they are “the walking dead.”

• Finally, the human condition has deteriorated, and they live with the threat that, one day, they may not be able to escape the violence.

Therefore, father and son must then create meaning on their own.

If you recall, they’re travelling south to survive the winter… but that’s not really a purpose as much as a milestone in their journey. It is not a reason to live, and neither a motive to act. They need something truly meaningful because, as Viktor Frankl said in Man’s Search For Meaning: “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”

In this post-apocalyptic world, this is not an easy task… and given the boy’s age, the duty falls entirely on the father’s shoulders. At the start, it is easy to think his meaning is what he told the boy here:

My job is to take care of you. I was appointed to do that by God.

…but the problem is the father is affected by a moral injury—something that specifically disrupts the meaning-making process TMT relies on. Protecting his son and being a good father were his humanly constructed beliefs about reality… but he had to act against that. Repeatedly. The father did not take care of his son when he endangered him by getting inside the cannibals’ house, even less when he considered mercy-killing him. That’s the problem, remember? Moral injury corrodes the mechanism he would normally use to cope.

Which leads us back to the point in the story where these catch-phrases appear—after the moral injury has deepened enough that the father must create new beliefs. Those beliefs crystallise into two commitments:

• Being “the good guys” means that they do not enslave, do not prey on others, and do not kill unless survival demands it.

• “Carrying the fire”, thus, elevates that stance into something closer to a vocation: not merely surviving, but living in service of their values.

This, in turn, serves three purposes:

1. It reframes what it means to be a good father. This is no longer just a “protect him at all costs, without exception”—which is precisely what caused the moral injury—but something more complex. Something that allows the father to take reasonable risks (which may endanger the boy) if the risk itself is motivated by the boy’s survival. Why? Because the father’s core belief now is no longer being a protector, but being “a good guy”—namely, that no matter what he does there are limits to his behaviour.

2. At the same time, “carrying the fire” gives meaning to their journey. After all, who else will do it if not them?

3. Finally, and more poignantly, it gives the boy something to hold onto once the father is gone. A reason to keep walking when there is no one left to walk beside him.

Yet these two catch-phrases can be read in a deeper way.

We could present “being the good guys” as a behaviour, and “the fire” as the name they give to what that behaviour protects: ethics and morality in a world that has abandoned both. Which brings me to one key question: how can you not fail morally in a world like this?

We can’t answer that yet, because we must first evaluate…

The characters in The Shape of The Sword.

You’ll notice that the same psychological ideas from The Road are approached here from different angles.

That said, the story has two main characters:

• The first one narrates the present timeline, and is a fictional version of Borges himself. In pure Borgesian fashion, the short story pretends to be a recount of the events during one of his trips to Uruguay. There he meets the second character:

• The Englishman at La Colorada9: a figure of mystery coming from Rio Grande do Sul, to where he’d arrived as a smuggler. From there, he acquired a farmhouse in north Uruguay where he lived surrounded by myths. The short story opens with his description:

His face was traversed by a vengeful scar, an ashen and almost perfect arc that sliced from the temple on one side of his head, to his cheek on the other. His true name does not matter; everyone in Tacuarembó called him “the Englishman at La Colorada.” […] The Englishman worked shoulder to shoulder with his peons. People say he was harsh to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously fair.

That scar is core to The Shape of the Sword. Fictional-Borges manages to visit the Englishman’s farmhouse and, while dining with him, asks for the story behind the scar. Bold. Yet after some consideration, the Englishman answers this:

“I will tell you the story of my scar under one condition—that no contempt or condemnation be withheld, no mitigation for any iniquity be pleaded.”

That’s… an unusual preface, don’t you think? One may expect such a scar to mark a battle survived, or someone defended. Instead, the Englishman is pre-emptively demanding to be judged—even refusing, in advance, any attempt to soften or excuse what he is about to confess. Could this be somehow related to the concept of moral injury we just discussed? Hold on to that idea; we’ll come back to it soon.

What matters now is that the narration—originally in first person from fictional-Borges point of view—changes. It becomes a first-person narrative from the Englishman’s perspective, as he recounts the events during 1922 in Connaught. After some context about the Irish Civil War, he introduces a third character:

One evening I shall never forget, there came to us a man, one of our own, from Munster—a man called John Vincent Moon.
He couldn’t have been more than twenty. […] He had studied, ardently and with some vanity, virtually every page of one of those Communist manuals; […] There are infinite reasons a man may have for hating or loving another man; Moon reduced the history of the world to one sordid economic conflict. […]

Not the most flattering introduction, but it highlights something important: Vincent Moon was a man of firm, almost rigid convictions. Convictions that, in his own mind, explained everything—how to understand the world and the people, reasons to act, certainties to stand on.

The Englishman elaborates:

The verdicts Moon handed down impressed me considerably less than the sense of unappealable and absolute truth with which he issued them. The new comrade did not argue, he did not debate—he pronounced judgement, contemptuously and, to a degree, wrathfully.

This matters because the Irish Civil War was, at its core, a conflict of beliefs—specifically, whether the Anglo-Irish Treaty was a necessary compromise or a betrayal of the republican cause. What made it so devastating was not merely the violence, but the fact that people who had fought together for independence (in the years before) now found themselves on opposite sides of that question… and did not stop believing they were right. If anything, the stakes of being right had never felt higher.

Vincent Moon embodies that certainty in its most extreme form. And it is precisely that certainty—the absolute conviction that his cause justified his actions—that will matter when we reveal what he actually did.

As the Englishman recounts it, during the guerrilla phase he saved Vincent Moon from capture and sheltered him in General Berkeley’s country house. For nine days, the Englishman left each morning to fight alongside his comrades whilst Moon remained upstairs, surrounded by books on military strategy, and pronouncing judgements he had no intention of acting on. On the tenth day, the Englishman returned to find Moon on the telephone… betraying their location to their enemies.

What follows is a chase through the house. In the Englishman’s words:

Once or twice I lost him, but I managed to corner him before the soldiers arrested me. From one of the general’s suits of armor, I seized a scimitar, and with that steel crescent left a flourish on his face forever—a half-moon of blood. To you alone, Borges—you, who are a stranger—I have made this confession. Your contempt is perhaps not so painful.

Pay attention to this: the Englishman left a scar on Vincent Moon’s face. The Englishman, who has a scar in his face—crossing from the temple in one side to the cheek on the other. It is one of the greatest twists in short stories, and it is also part of a very specific psychological presentation related to morality and beliefs. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Let me first tell you how it all ends.

Fictional-Borges does not immediately understand what this confession means, and asks what became of Vincent Moon. The answer is the most celebrated line in the story:

“Do you not believe me?” he stammered. “Do you not see set upon my face the mark of my iniquity? I have told you the story this way so that you would hear it out. It was I who betrayed the man who saved me and gave me shelter—it is I who am Vincent Moon. Now, despise me.”

The Englishman and Vincent Moon are the same person—meaning that someone else scarred him. Actually, I mentioned that person before, in the same oblique way that Moon acknowledged him at the very beginning of his narration:

Of my companions there, […] one, the best of us all, was shot at dawn in the courtyard of a prison, executed by men filled with dreams.

The reason for his death? Moon’s betrayal.

His name? Unknown.

At this point you’re probably wondering something: why would he tell the story in this way? Here is where psychology comes to our aid once again.

In 1987, E. Tory Higgins presented the theory of self-discrepancy—differences between how people see themselves now and the self-guides they compare themselves against. In this theory, we have: the actual self (who we are), the ideal self (who we wish we were), and the ought self (who we should be)10. If we apply this to Vincent Moon, we could argue that:

• His ideal/ought self is that of a brave revolutionary—someone like the man who saved him and who he ended up betraying: “the best of us.” Not a casual description. Moon was naming his own ideal self without recognising it.

• Meanwhile, his actual self is that of a betrayer.

This incompatibility is the source of a moral injury. If you recall, moral injury represents the damage done to someone’s identity and principles, caused by acting against your own values⁷. Vincent Moon had built his entire sense of self around rigid beliefs—the Communist manuals, the theories of revolution, the certainty that he knew what the cause demanded. And yet, when the moment came, he betrayed the very man who embodied everything he claimed to stand for—the nameless one who was Moon’s ideal self though, at the time, he failed to recognise it.

Vincent Moon tells the story in this way—pretending to be the one he betrayed—because he cannot yet cope with his actions, and so narratively splits the ideal and actual selves to be able to recount the story. The scar has now become a permanent inscription of guilt: a part of the actual self that constantly reminds him of the moral injury… and that he will never become his ideal self. After all, notice the precise words Moon used to describe the scar: “a half-moon of blood.” Moon is his surname and, as we saw before in The Road, names are tied to one’s identity.

The scar—aptly, the shape of the sword—and the moral injury it represents, is now Vincent Moon’s identity.

Yet there is something else to consider in relation to the one command Vincent Moon issues to Borges: “Now, despise me.” That is the closing line of the story, and it links quite well to that awkward preface Vincent Moon offered before recounting his story:

”[…] that no contempt or condemnation be withheld, no mitigation for any iniquity be pleaded.”

This implies that Vincent Moon loathes himself—a known consequence of moral injuries—but that contempt is not enough, and so he demands it from others. The authoritative tone he used with fictional-Borges also reflects a need: Moon needs others to validate how he feels now because, perhaps, he no longer trusts his own moral judgement. He already acted on his beliefs before, and that—ironically—led him to betray those beliefs.

So here comes a crucial point: Vincent Moon was not telling this story as a confession of what was done to him, but of what he did—or better said, who he is, and is seeking the contempt of others to validate the guilt caused by his moral injury. Where the father in The Road instinctively tried to create new beliefs (namely, “we’re the good guys” and “we’re carrying the fire”) to stop the moral injury from worsening, Vincent Moon in The Shape of The Sword cannot resolve the conflict on his own and neither create a new meaning… and so simply searches for confirmation of what he feels.

In this way, this story leads us to another question around morality: How do you live with the knowledge that you have failed morally?

What we have seen so far is two stories evaluating morality from different standpoints:

• In The Road, the man and the boy want to act ethically and morally but are constantly at risk of failing. This book presents morality as something one must actively maintain.

• In The Shape of The Sword, however, Vincent Moon has already failed… and so the story is about a moral failure becoming an identity (the actual self: “I am the traitor”).

Yet there is something more to analyse here.

What if I told you that these are not just characters, but ‘characterised themes’?

How would that contribute to our discussion on morality?

Before we dive in, I want to explain one nifty literary trick—something called literalised metaphors.

In a literalised metaphor, a figure of speech is interpreted or depicted as being literally true within a book or short story. As I see it, we can apply this approach to the books we’ve been discussing—namely, taking an abstraction and giving it narrative form—by reading the characters as embodied themes. In this sense:

• the boy from The Road becomes morality itself, while

• Vincent Moon from The Shape of The Sword becomes interpretive morality.

Let’s undo that idea, one story at a time.

To understand the boy in The Road as morality embodied…

—we need to also evaluate a handful of scenes. For example, here is what happens when father and son encounter a man who was struck by lightning:

The boy kept looking back. Papa? he whispered. What is wrong with the man?
He’s been struck by lightning.
Cant we help him? Papa?
No. We cant help him.
The boy kept pulling at his coat. Papa? he said.
[…]No. We cant help him. There’s nothing to be done for him.

A lightning strike is quite deadly, and we could argue the boy is too young to understand the waste of supplies that helping this man would be. We can also see the father is not technically wrong either… but weren’t they “the good guys”? Weren’t they “carrying the fire”? Or does morality and ethicality only apply when it is free of consequences?

This type of conversation repeats quite often—after the boy spots another youngster on the street, after a thiefling steals their supplies and they catch up with him, with every old man they cross, with animals, anything. But here’s the interesting detail: the more the father’s moral injury progresses—the more he endangers the boy in his pursuit of supplies, or sometimes simply due to being tired and committing mistakes—the more the boy insists on helping others.

For example, after they risked their lives to get supplies—and finally stocked themselves full—they encounter someone and the following happens:

In the morning they stood in the road and he and the boy argued about what to give the old man. In the end he didnt get much. Some cans of vegetables and of fruit. Finally the boy just went over to the edge of the road and sat in the ashes. The old man fitted the tins into his knapsack and fastened the straps. You should thank him you know, the man said. I wouldnt have given you anything.[…]
Will it hurt his feelings?
No. That’s not why he did it.
Why did he do it?
He looked over at the boy and he looked at the old man. You wouldnt understand, he said. I’m not sure I do.
Maybe he believes in God.
I dont know what he believes in.

Such behaviour may appear irrational if the boy is read purely as a character… we would have expected some quote-on-quote ‘development’, some ‘growth’ based on the father’s training. Perhaps we’d expect the boy finally grasping the conditions of the world they live on, or—more logically—being corrupted by it.

But that’s not what happens.

If we assess the boy as a characterised theme, his behaviour fits what he embodies: an irreducible moral instinct, never corrupted by the world because what is moral will always be moral. The boy’s requests to help others are not the whims of an obtuse toddler unable to grasp the situation they’re in—these requests are the demands of morality itself. He insists on helping others and not abandoning strangers even when he understands the costs of doing so and, in addition to that, continuously questions the father on whether they are still “the good guys.”

Again, were we to read the boy only as a character, the father consenting to help others could be seen as him merely trying to appease a toddler… but that would be quite against the father’s character—the savvy, pragmatic, ruthless-when-necessary man the book showed us he was. The morally-injured survivor who crafted a new set of beliefs in what we could argue was self-defence.

Again, if consider the boy as a characterised theme, the father’s actions take on another dimension and meaning. This is no longer paternal love and dedication, but something more radical—the answer to the very first question I posited in the introduction: morality is not something we tell ourselves we’ve done, morality is something we do and choose to do constantly, regardless of the cost, and without guarantee of a reward.

Why? Because as the famous existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, said: “Man makes himself; he is not found ready-made; he makes himself by the choice of his morality, and he cannot but choose a morality”11.

Which brings me back to yet another question—the one I told you The Road was exploring: how can you not fail morally in a world like this?

You will have to forgive me, because I was being deliberate with my choice of words. I should have asked it in a more straightforward way: can morality survive in a world like this? Or, knowing what we know now: can the boy—morality embodied—survive?

The answer is bleak: he cannot.

The boy requires constant care an attention—the father must feed him, warm him, wash his clothes, give him medicine. The boy is a child and caring for him is the father’s duty, yes… but just like the boy, morality cannot exist on its own. As we saw when I introduced the setting—and as the book’s nihilistic plot takes painstaking effort to demonstrate—moral and ethical behaviour decays promptly if there are no laws and social norms to enforce and demand it. In such a situation, morality can only exist if it is actively chosen—precisely in the same way the father chooses the son: to care for him, to protect him, to listen to his requests to be a “good guy.”

Eventually, the most contested part of the book comes: the father becomes sick and eventually dies in a cave. The boy—although he’s lived his entire life on the road and learned to survive from his father—doesn’t know what to do. He eats everything in one or two days, wastes their supplies, then goes to stand alone in the middle of the road.

Utterly irrational, were he only a character.

Yet what happens at the very end supports the idea I presented here: reading the boy as the embodiment of morality. A man approaches the boy, perhaps the age of the (now late) father, arguing he talked to his wife and decided to come and rescue him. After a few questions, the following conversation ensues:

How do I know you’re one of the good guys?
You dont. You’ll have to take a shot.
Are you carrying the fire?
Am I what?
Carrying the fire.
You’re kind of weirded out, arent you?
No. […] So are you?
What, carrying the fire?
Yes.
Yeah. We are.
Do you have any kids?
We do. […] We have a little boy and we have a little girl.
[…] And you didnt eat them.
No.
You dont eat people.
No. We dont eat people.
And I can go with you?
Yes. You can.

Did you notice how easily this stranger understood what “the fire” meant? That’s because we can read this encounter as yet another man, who has nothing to gain and everything to lose, actively choosing morality—not once but thrice: with the two little ones he already had, and now with the boy.

Given how bleak the book is, it ends on a positive note: literally for the boy, and metaphorically for morality itself.

The ending confirms that moral principles depend on people choosing them even when doing so is costly. If the father abandoned that responsibility—the fire, and thus, the boy—morality dies… not because it was false, but because it is vulnerable. The Road never considers morality as a construct or illusion depending on society; it presents it as something real but contingent—almost like a living thing that requires care to exist.

Yet we are humans and, as Sartre argued, “before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning that you choose”12. Therefore, if we make morality part of our identity, then it becomes part of our subjective interpretation.

Which brings us back to Vincent Moon in The Shape of The Sword.

I presented him as interpretive morality.

To understand this, we need to mentally split the character into two:

• Vincent Moon, the idealist boy during 1922 in Connaught. The one who betrayed “the best of us.”

• The Englishman, as the older, scarred version that now lives in north Uruguay. The one carrying the moral injury. The one who, as we established before, does not trust his own moral judgement and needs external loathing to anchor himself.

Back then, Vincent Moon had a set of beliefs that led him to understand that betraying his saviour was the moral thing to do… but the story never reveals what those beliefs actually were. We only get the comments on “the Communist manuals”, or the “dialectical materialism” and the “strategy books”. This summarisation is, perhaps in pure Borgesian fashion, too easy to blame on the limitations of the format (this is, after all, an 8-pages long short story)—but we can also read it as a deliberate choice on the Englishman’s part. He chose to never tell us what Vincent Moon (his former self) actually believed, nor the reasoning for the betrayal. What matters to him is the act, not the reasons that led to it.

Could it be that those beliefs would make the betrayal… be moral?

There is a somewhat contentious topic in philosophy (and also politics and history) that we can use to understand this: moral relativism. Depending on the discipline it tends to refer to different things, but metaethical moral relativism (MMR) considers that: “the truth or falsity of moral judgements, or their justification, is not absolute or universal, but relative to the traditions, convictions, or practices of a group of persons”13.

Convictions. Precisely what led Vincent Moon to act as he did, later shaping how the Englishman tells the story. He frames his former self as obtuse, too young, too judgemental, a coward who trusted books over action. He biases us, deliberately, towards the worst possible reading of Vincent Moon. But MMR would ask: is that the only valid lens? It was a Civil War. Moon was young. He believed in something deeply enough to act on it. I’m not excusing what he did—I’m merely pointing out that the Englishman isn’t giving us the full picture.

Ultimately, that’s what MMR would argue: depending on the lens you use, what is moral… changes. The Englishman is just one lens to the morality of what Vincent Moon did, and he’s presenting himself as the only one.

So here comes what this story is guiding us towards: morality is subjective, and it can be easily filtered through unreliable storytelling. Discourse can easily shape what we consider ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ That final line—“Now, despise me.”—is perfectly moral relativism, because the Englishman is telling us how to interpret Vincent Moon.

Ultimately, both books are correct.

As The Road proposes, morality is fragile because it cannot exist on its own—it is, as the boy showed us—something we are responsible for keeping alive, regardless of the laws and social norms that may or may not exist at a given moment in time. However, as the Shape of the Sword argued, morality is also something we are constantly reshaping through subjective discourse.

Somewhere in between both books, morality starts to look like a fiction we all agree to believe, because it depends on perspective and framing… which are, by design, perennially suspect.

This leads me to a closing question: if morality is fragile and narratively unstable, what actually anchors it, if anything?

If you enjoyed my comparison of two very unlikely books, I have something else to offer you:

• You may want to check my episode titled Broken Heroes, Broken Ethics. This was a conversation with guests on Watchmen, winner of the Hugo Award, and often lauded as the greatest graphic novel ever written. In that conversation, moral ambiguity was a recurrent topic.

• Also, if the topic of literalised metaphors interests you, I have an essay titled Take It Literal: Literalised Metaphors in Speculative Fiction. I cover four wildly different examples, and even offer guidelines on how to leverage this device.

You can find both—including the transcript of this episode and all citations—at booksundone.com. Once there, you can also subscribe and support me. I write weekly with in-depth literary and thematic discussions of speculative fiction. All links will be in the episode’s description.

Thanks for listening, and happy reading.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

I couldn’t agree more with Anthony Burgess. A translator’s job is not only a matter of swapping words in a language for those in another. It requires—demands, even—that one chooses words so precisely that rhythm, thematic meaning, and cultural nuance carry through… all while remaining accessible to readers in the target language.

Translating is not an easy task, yet loving language as much as I do1, I wanted to discuss some nuances I noticed when reading Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. Perhaps this novel hit closer to home because—just as the author of the book—I’m also from Argentina, though I later emigrated to Australia.

Therefore, this essay will examine three translation choices in Sarah Moses’ English version: the handling of honorifics, the inconsistent treatment of proper names, and the cultural weight embedded in some specific words.

Almost every language has honorifics…

…but not every language—and neither every culture nor country—uses them in the same way. Furthermore, their use and meaning across time can also vary.

In Argentina, in particular, there are two ‘sets’ of honorifics:

• The equivalent to Mister, Missus, and Miss: Señor, Señora, and Señorita respectively, and

• Something that doesn’t quite have a translation into English, but it is culturally loaded: Don and Doña—with the former being the masculine and the latter the feminine versions.

We can see both of these in action in Tender Is The Flesh. Here’s an example of the first one:

Someone is clapping and calling his name. "Hello, Señor Tejo?"

The other honorific can be seen here:

She tells him that his father, whom she calls Don Armando, is doing fine. He tells Nélida he’ll stop by for a visit soon, that he’s already transferred the money for this month. Nélida calls him “dear”, says, “Don’t worry, dear, Don Armando is stable, he has his moments, but he’s stable.”

But here is a key distinction:

• Señor carries no such cultural weight, and it functions as formal address, used in the same way an English speaker would use Mr or Sir.

• Don, on the contrary, is quite loaded with historical context and meaning. Allow me to elaborate.

Technically, Don is an archaic honorific with roots in Spanish colonial culture.

It always precedes a name, and formality depends on pairing: while Don Armando Tejo (full name) is the most formal usage, Don Armando (pairing only to the first name) implies respect with some familiarity. However, Don Tejo (the honorific preceding only the surname) marks the speaker as uneducated.

Originally, the honorific was reserved, almost exclusively, to the nobility.

But here’s where things get interesting.

Almost every language has homonyms—words that are written and spelled the same, but have different meaning, which must be inferred by context. This is the case with ‘don’, which also means “Gift” or “an aptitude to perform a task” or even “a characteristic granted to someone by a deity”2. This dual meaning eventually shifted the honorific’s use during the colonial era (known as the Virreinato), extending to those who conquered land in the Crown’s name using their own resources—hence titles such as Don Juan de Garay.

Over time, the landowning association faded, but the honorific persisted and mutated in use. For example, the common insult “he’s a nobody” would be translated as “Es un don nadie” using the honorific. At the same time, praise for good manners would be “don de gente”—roughly translated as “gifted with people’s skills” yet appealing to the honorific.

This shift over time also affect how it was used. It became more commonly used by older generations, and far more common with men (e.g., Don Armando) than with women (Doña Cecilia). Likewise, it is often reserved for seniors than for middle-aged people.

Thus, Don carries a landowning history, appears in both insults and praise, and has shifted meaning—and targets—across generations. Like Japanese -san or -dono, it encodes social nuance that Mister or Sir cannot capture—and so has no English equivalent translation.

Yet in the Sarah Moses translation, both honorifics were preserved in Spanish.

The translation preserves both honorifics, likely as an attempt at foreignisation—namely, deliberately maintaining the source text's linguistic and cultural features rather than adapting to the target culture. However, preserving Señor adds cognitive load to the reader without a corresponding cultural payoff.

While I appreciate foreignisation, I believe it’s worthwhile only when there is cultural and/or historical nuance to preserve. In the case of Señor, there is none. So here’s how I’d done it.

This is the original passage in Spanish (yes, Spanish writing uses em-dashes as indicator of dialogue):

Alguien aplaude y grita su nombre.

—Buenas. ¿Señor Tejo?

Sarah Moses translation:

Someone is clapping and calling his name. "Hello, Señor Tejo?"

My take:

Someone claps and shouts his name. "Hello. Mr. Tejo?"

Beyond the honorific change, I’ve also preserved the simple present tense of the original (‘aplaude’ for ‘claps’, and ‘grita’ for ‘shouts’), which creates a more immediate, sharper rhythm than the progressive form.

Yet as we saw, honorifics are accompanied by names, and…

Names often have an underlying meaning. Translating them or not is also a translator’s choice.

Tender is the Flesh is set in Argentina, though the location—city or town—is not specified in the text. As a result, most names are fairly common names one could encounter there: Marcos, Armando, Nélida, Cecilia, Marisa; the only exception are foreigners, such as Urami (a Japanese character) or Urlet (a Romanian ex-patriate).

However, Sarah Moses’ translation renders one character's name in English: Jasmine.

This is a complex translation choice. The character is, in reality, a ‘head’—a human woman bred as livestock—and so begins the story without a name. Therefore, the book primes the reader through the perception of Marcos Tejo, the narrator, who slowly develops a preference for her scent:

He can smell her. She has a strong smell because she’s dirty, but he likes it, thinks of the intoxicating scent of jasmine, wild and sharp, vibrant. His breath quickens.

Eventually, the introduction is quite abrupt:

He inhales her wild, vibrant smell, hugs her. “Hi, Jasmine.” He untied her when he woke up.

…and the reader is left to infer that Marcos named this woman based on her scent: that of a jasmine flower. In Spanish, her original—spelled as Jazmín—is also the name of the flower, which shows that the translator likely focused on making the name’s origin and meaning quite legible for the audience. But this choice breaks the world coherence. Why would an Argentinian character, in Argentina, give someone an English name?

Consider this.

Up to here, the book has shown us something: characters of Argentinian origin have names common in Argentina, while foreign characters retain their foreign names. Therefore, why would Marcos choose an English name for this woman? While a reader can abstract themselves from this nuance, Jasmine is the only English name in the entire story, making the contrast even starker.

I would have solved this by adding two words:

1. First, I’d kept the three original mentions to the “scent of jasmine” entirely in English. These prime the reader exactly as the original did.

2. Then, at the moment her name is said for the first time, I’d add a clarification connecting the name to the scent. Like so:

He inhales her wild, vibrant smell, hugs her. “Hi, Jazmín.” His jasmine. He untied her when he woke up.

Here, the reader would’ve needed to connect “her wild, wibrant smell” (which was already introduced) to “His jasmine,” while reading that new sentence after the dialogue as meaning clarification. My this choice would’ve preserved word coherence over immediate transparency, while trusting literary readers to bridge jasmine and Jazmín.

This brings me to the last example:

Specific words that carry complex meanings, often related to usage and social connotations.

Some languages handle this through synonyms. For example, in English, start and begin are rather colloquial, while commence carries a formal or organisational tone. For example, jobs seldom have “start dates”; they tend to have “commencement dates.”

This is roughly what happens with forbidden and prohibited. Both mean “not allowed”, but forbidden is often used for something that feels more socially punishable or taboo, while prohibited is more commonly used for formal rules, laws, or regulations. That distinction does not exist in Spanish, where both meanings are carried by a single word: “prohibido”.

But just as it was with Jazmín’s name, translating the author’s use of ‘prohibido’ was also quite a complex endeavour. Let me show you the Sarah Moses’ translation of the excerpt in question:

When he’s finished, he brings her to her feet and looks at her. […] He moves towards the smell of jasmine, and without thinking, hugs her. The female doesn’t move or tremble. She just raises her head and looks at him. […] He strokes her neck. Now, he’s the one who trembles. He removes his jeans and stands there, naked. His breath quickens. He continues to hug her as it rains down.

What he wants to do is prohibited. But he does it anyway.

Though the chapter fades to black3, it is easy to guess what Marcos does to Jazmín. However, the book’s world-building adds additional meaning to it. Allow me to explain.

If you recall, Jazmín is not a ‘woman’, but a ‘head’: livestock, and seen as non-human by the other characters. Later in the story, we discover that Marcos, the narrator, originally worked as an inspector during the ‘transition’—the period during which cannibalism was legalised—and so “was one of the people who drafted the regulations and rules.” During that time, he encountered men who kept female ‘heads’ in their houses for… reasons. The book explains:

With that statement, they were able to call the team in charge of examining heads for evidence that they’d been “enjoyed”, which was the official word used in such cases. The regulations specify that reproduction is only permitted by artificial means. […] As such, domestic females should be virgins. […] Having sex with a head, enjoying her, is illegal and the sentence is death in the Municipal Slaughterhouse.

So yes, there is a regulation prohibiting what Marcos was going to do to Jazmín… but there is also a social connotation. Consider this excerpt: young Marcos—still working as inspector—and his colleague discover that a couple had hidden a female ‘head’ under their bed and that the husband was “enjoying her”:

Eventually they looked in the couple’s room. Underneath the bed was a wooden box with small wheels that was big enough to hold a person lying down. When they opened it, they saw the female, in what looked like a coffin, unable to move. […] When the woman walked into the room and saw they’d discovered the female, she broke down. She began to cry and told them that her husband had sex with the head and not with her, that she couldn’t take it any more, she’d been replaced by an animal, and couldn’t bear the idea of sleeping with that disgusting creature under the bed.

The bold styling is mine, hoping to bring your attention to the social perception of the book’s society: ‘heads’ are considered “animals,” not humans. “Disgusting” and “creatures.” What the husband did to this ‘head’ was, in the wife’s eyes, forbidden because it was taboo or socially looked down upon.

Therefore, when the author originally wrote:

El que tiembla ahora es él. Se saca los jeans y se queda desnudo. La respiración se acelera. La sigue abrazando debajo de la lluvia.

Lo que quiere hacer está prohibido. Pero lo hace.

…she was appealing to both meanings: the social implications and the legislation. If you recall, both forbidden and prohibited translate as ‘prohibido’ in Spanish.

So which one to choose? The answer is not straightforward, because the trade offs are complex.

Allow me to explain.

Tender Is The Flesh is, at its core, a thought-experiment on language. It shows how the choice of words—specifically, bureaucratic, clinical ones—can detach someone from the moral impact of their actions; saying Marcos’ job is “to kill humans” has a different ethical weight to “processing heads.” This effect is something I discussed in extent in my podcast:

Therefore, the Sarah Moses’ translation chose prohibited—partly because of grammatical similarity, and partly to appeal to Marcos’ awareness of the legislation. The cost was emotional impact. However, using forbidden would’ve prioritised the emotional impact, making it more legible to the reader, while perhaps violating the central theme of the book.

What matters here is this: this problematic doesn’t exist in the original Spanish. ‘Prohibido’ means both prohibited and forbidden at the same time, so a Spanish reader would’ve simultaneously gathered the legislative prohibition and the taboo.

Why would I have chosen?

I deeply valued the thematic depth of Tender Is The Flesh, but I also valued the moral ambiguity of Marcos Tejo, and how his morals are slowly corrupted by language. Given the point in the story where this scene happen, and the mental state of Marcos at the time, I’d chosen forbidden—simply to reinforce that, at some point, he did have morals… and simply resorted to clinical or legislative language later on, when the consequences of his actions became unbearable.

To close off

Allow me to say this: translation is one job with no clear-cut answers. Ultimately, it is a matter of trade-offs based on world-building, authorial intent, legibility, semantic and cultural meaning, thematic work, rhythm, and style. Different translators, even if aiming for the same target language, would likely produce different results.

But that’s a topic for another essay.

Happy reading,

Livia~

Leave a comment

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector is set in Rio de Janeiro, roughly around the fifties or sixties. Structurally, it presents an outer story (of a writer struggling with a character) and a story-within (of a fictional woman) that constantly blend into each other, with the writer interrupting his own narrative to inject self-reflections linked to the emotional register revealed by the woman’s tale. It is in this blend that the theme of ‘empathy’ shines the most.

The ‘outermost’ tale is about Rodrigo S.M.

…a fictional writer who, not long before he sat down to write, crossed gazes with a woman across the street. She was from the Brazilian northeast (a historically poor region); in his words:

Because on a street in Rio de Janeiro I glimpsed in the air the feeling of perdition on the face of a northeastern girl. Not to mention that as a boy I grew up in the northeast. I also know about things because I’m alive.

This is the seed of his empathy—seeing in her face the reflection of an emotion he used to suffer due to sharing some roots with her. What follows is his writerly struggle: he wants to craft a story inspired by that girl, but he knows nothing of the real one. Rodrigo writes:

If there is any truth to it—and of course, the story is true though invented—may everyone recognise it inside himself because all of us are one and he who is not poor in money is poor in spirit or longing because he lacks something more precious than gold—there are those who lack the delicate essential.

That ‘delicate essential’ is, as I see it, a quest for meaning and purpose constantly questioned throughout the book—with Rodrigo unknowingly establishing empathy and understanding as his purpose (or even self-discovery), and the girl of the story... being something else.

So begins (or rather, ‘interrupts’ his strife) the story-within-the-story:

The tale of Macabéa, a poor orphan girl from the northeast who, after her parents died of a disease, came to live with her aunt. The aunt taught her to type to save her from prostitution, but passed shortly after Macabéa secured a poorly paying job as a typist.

For her [...] reality too was very little. She could deal better with her unreality, living in sloooow motion [...] vagueness was her earthly world, vagueness was the inside of nature.

What matters most about Macabéa is not her outward poverty, which is clear from the beginning—with her malnourishment, her illiteracy, her lack of basic hygiene, her lack of ‘common sense’. What matters is what poverty didn’t allow her to learn: how to question her situation, how to dare hope for something different and decide how to work towards it. This inward poverty reflects in a thought she often returns to: “This is how things were.” Unchallengeable. Unchangeable. She experiences life as absolute ‘facts’(*) that cannot be understood because she has no means to do so nor to secure the help she needs.

This leads me to another theme—something that Macabéa knows very well: she’s invisible to society. At the very opening, Rodrigo writes:

[...] she sometimes smiles at other people on the street. Nobody smiles back because they don’t even look at her.

The topic of her social invisibility is brought up often enough because poverty—both outward and its inward consequence—is a by-product of society... and one that, unfortunately, we seldom attempt to fix in any meaningful way. The fact she’s invisible even to her so-called boyfriend reflects on how the basis for empathy is recognising the other as an equal—something the man, Olímpico, cannot do even though he shares his northeastern roots with her.

Yet while narrating Macabéa’s story, Rodrigo flows back to himself. As readers, we cannot detach his struggle to write from her lack of struggle to simply be.

Thus, as it emerges, the story-within produces a change on Rodrigo’s perception.

He spends the first dozen pages voicing his difficulties surrounding this endeavour as if avoiding that which is painful: understanding her in order to write her story. Yet the more he does so, the more he comes to ‘love’ Macabéa. This ‘love’ is certainly neither sexual nor platonic, but perhaps a reference to empathy: how we can truly, unbiasedly, appreciate someone after we have seen the world through their eyes. Thematically, it implies her poverty no longer distresses him because he understands it. It also offers a counterpoint to Olímpico’s lack of empathy and love for Macabéa.

The ending in itself is, without spoilers, abrupt—yet it ties back to the idea of hope as the enabler of a quest for meaning and purpose, and how, sometimes, the world doesn’t really allow us to craft meaning1.

To close, a word on Lispector’s prose

It is technically brilliant. She moves between Rodrigo’s real world and Macabéa’s fictional one with effortless grace—often within a single sentence—submerging and resurfacing the reader between levels of storytelling without warning. This constant blurring is not a mere stylistic flourish; it makes the reader acutely conscious of Macabéa’s story being constructed in real time by a narrator who does not fully understand his own subject. Furthermore, Rodrigo does not follow a temporal thread, instead moving freely between her past and present—guided by his need to discover more about her.

The result is a style that does not describe Macabéa so much as conjure her... though it demands patience and a willingness to be disoriented. Readers seeking a tidy narrative arc will find little comfort here, but those seeking an experience may have come to the right place.

(*) On the use of the word ‘facts’.

The word ‘facts’ in this story may have several meanings. In the very first page, Rodrigo writes:

Thinking is an act. Feeling is a fact.

Philosophically speaking, this is incredibly rich. Feelings are automatic reactions; they come to us due to what happens, and we have no control over them... but we do control, to some extent, what we think. How we reason, what we reason, and the conclusions we reach. Those, in turn, can affect how we feel in retrospect about what happens to us.

However, if you remove emotional literacy—the ability for someone to distinguish that, for example, contempt and frustration are two different ‘flavours’ of anger—the very act of feeling becomes estranged from thinking: one can no longer study their own emotions, one can only be those emotions.

I believe Lispector was circling this topic when using the word ‘fact’ as a replacement for ‘unknown or unlabelled emotions.’ What I find more interesting, is that Rodrigo—the fictional writer—eventually tires of ‘facts’... because, let’s be honest, true empathy is far more than ‘relating’, but an demanding an active task that requires suspending one’s beliefs to see and experiment the world as another person does.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

And yet some authors will simply switch from third-person to second-person. Like so (bold style is mine):

He could remember everything of her save her scent. Seated in a theatre with her beside him leaning forward listening to the music. Gold scrollwork and sconces and the tall columnar folds of the drapes at either side of the stage. She held his hand in her lap and he could feel the tops of her stockings through the thin stuff of her summer dress. Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.

Some may call this a ‘problem,’ or even daringly criticise the author for ‘committing an amateur’s mistake’—and yes, tense- and person-switching can be both of those things… if done unintentionally and because of losing the story’s tone.

However, switching can also be deliberate, leveraged as a device in order to cause a specific effect. This is what the quote above is doing—a popular excerpt from a Pulitzer Prize winning novel: The Road, by Cormac McCarthy.

That changes things quite a bit.

Yet McCarthy was not the only one—and neither the first one—to have used it. Consider this other excerpt, which actually predates The Road; it’s the third and fourth paragraphs of Heat, a 1989 short-story by Joyce Carol Oates1:

Rhea and Rhoda Kunkel went flying on their rusted old bicycles, down the long hill toward the railroad yard, Whipple’s Ice, the scrubby pastureland where dairy cows grazed. They’d stolen six dollars from their own grandmother who loved them. They were eleven years old, they were identical twins, they basked in their power.

Rhea and Rhoda Kunkel: it was always Rhea-and-Rhoda. never Rhoda-and-Rhea, I couldn’t say why. You just wouldn’t say the names that way. Not even the teachers at school would say them that way.

Joyce Carol Oates is not an amateur author.

By now, I hope I’ve convinced you that this switch seems deliberate—and if so, you must be probably asking one very sensible question: what’s the purpose of switching like this?

That’s what we’ll explore in this essay. We’ll analyse some examples from The Road while reviewing some English grammar rules to understand both the purpose and the effect they have on the reader.

In English, the second person is not straightforward.

It has quite a few uses beyond addressing one’s audience.

Because of this, its presence may not indicate that the story is a framed narrative, though it may—quite subtly—breach the fourth wall to impact the reader in a way that the other grammatical persons may not be able to pull off. But before we reach that point, I want to review some specific grammar rules.

Everything builds from the generic you.

You (not generic, pun intended) have probably heard sentences such as this: “Brushing one’s hair is crucial for appearances.” Here, the pronoun ‘one’ is called the singular impersonal—but in everyday language, that phrase may be said like this: “Brushing your hair is crucial for appearances.” When we use ‘you’ to replace the singular impersonal pronoun ‘one’, we call that the generic you.

The “Brushing your hair is crucial for appearances” is not giving an order to—or making a claim about—a single individual (in particular, whoever is reading this). It is talking about virtually anyone. It’s generic.

Therefore, one reason to change to second-person in the middle of a narrative can be to appeal to the generic ‘you’—instead of relying on ‘one’—if the narrative’s tone must be more aligned with colloquial speech.

Consider this example (again, bold styling is mine):

Read more

On the one hand, there are authors who refuse it despite their work fitting the description rather well—Margaret Atwood being the most prominent example. The suspicion is that the genre label may indicate something more akin to second-tier literature than anything else, and certain writers would rather not have it attached to their work1. On the other hand, there are equally vocal authors and readers who find speculative itself a rather “pretentious” label, and perhaps a failed attempt to compete with high-brow literature.

Yet regardless of the animosities, what makes a work of literature speculative?

One answer lies in a device called literalised metaphors—what Ken Liu defined as taking “some aspect of reality that we usually speak of as metaphorical” and then “making that metaphor literally true [to be] able to gain a different perspective and understanding of reality”2.

It sounds straightforward, but neither crafting nor reading (and understanding one) is simple. Therefore, in today’s essay, we’ll first dive into a more in-depth definition, cover three essential points, and for each, I’ll analyse very specific—and quite unconventional—examples: from movies, books, and graphic novels. After that, I will share a list of considerations to develop literalised metaphors.

Literalised metaphors are a literary device:

One specific element (or a set of elements) within the text that add thematic depth and complexity, requiring critical reading skills—and maybe some philosophising—to be fully understood.

They are also the greatest enabler of thematic subtlety: an author’s ability to hide something—such as ideas, points of view, what-ifs, or even social or political commentary—within a book, in a way that only a critical reader would be able to discover what the author truly meant. As McKitterick observed3:

One of SF’s greatest tools is the literal metaphor, where an actual, literal thing in the story can stand in metaphorically for something in our world, as a means to critique that thing without immediately throwing up defensive walls against admitting we’ve failed in some way or otherwise need to improve.

But how is this done?

In ordinary language, regular metaphors work precisely because of the distance they create between what’s happening on the page, and what that truly means—not for the story or plot, but thematically. When we say someone was “rewritten by a difficult experience”, we understand the emotion without having to confront the thing itself: that whatever happened during that “difficult experience” deeply affected the person’s identity and self… but what if whatever happened had literally rewritten someone’s memories and personality?

By taking the metaphor well, literally—instead of as a figure of speech—we can create a whole story around it. That is precisely what speculative fiction does, though there are caveats to it.

Read more

In this review, I will cover the elements of the story through the three ‘interwoven’ genres I mentioned.

First, this is a fictional story set during the Second World War, in the small town of Molching, on the outskirts of Munich. The bulk of the story takes place between 1939 and 1943, and follows Liesel Meminger: from the first time Death meets her when she is nine years old (Death is there to take her younger brother), to the moment Death collects the ‘journal’ she wrote during the war. Liesel is German, and it is implied her parents were German Communists—meaning that her biological mother was forced (though there are few details about her) to give Liesel to an adoptive family before disappearing.

Her adoptive family lives on a relatively poor street, not far from Dachau—one of the concentration camps. The book also follows some of the neighbours; for example a Nazi shopkeeper, a widow of unknown political affiliation who has lost both sons to the war, frightened people, radicalised people, and small children with little understanding of what is happening. From this group, Liesel’s adoptive father is the most important character.

Hans Hubermann is German. He survived the First World War because a Jewish friend—who also taught him to play the accordion—saved his life. As the plot develops, this

connection escalates unfavourably: while working as a painter, Hans ‘commits the crime’ of repainting slurs on a Jewish man’s door. This costs him his membership of the NSDAP, which in turn hurts his work, as he receives fewer and fewer commissions. Things take a further turn when Liesel is eleven years old and Hans arranges something else entirely: to hide Max Vandenburg—the son of his deceased Jewish friend—in their basement.

Something to note is that familiarity with WWII history enriches the reading because—more often than not—Death (the narrator) is quite vague when referencing events during the war. For example, he mentions ‘the beach in the north of France’ before recounting how many souls he collected, or shares a scene in which a returned soldier ironically asks a child, ‘Do you think this is cold?’—only for it to be revealed later that the man survived Stalingrad. Sometimes, Death describes the skies after bombing raids with an abstract focus on colour, as though the grim reaper himself does not wish to dwell on the suffering and death on the ground.

Some comments are clearer than others, but the effect is always the same: once realisation dawns, reality hits differently.

But let me move on to the speculative element: Death as the narrator.

One would think Death would make the story quite grim, but that’s not the case. Death takes no sides, and is kept relentlessly busy by what humans do to one another. Here is where one of the key themes of the book come into play: in the end, everyone meets Death, regardless of the flag they wave.

Overall, he is a fascinating narrator: mesmerising and thoroughly opinionated, to the point that he often ‘interrupts’ Liesel’s story to offer a comment or two. For example:

I do not carry a sickle or scythe. I only wear a hooded black robe when it’s cold. And I don’t have those skull-like facial features you seem to enjoy pinning on me from a distance. You want to know what I truly look like? I’ll tell you: find yourself a mirror while I continue.

Death is never graphic in his commentary. On the contrary, and as per the example above, he is constantly reminding the reader of what humans do to other humans: the terrible and unthinkable, but also the acts of kindness.

The final element to consider is the book’s literary construction. Death narrates in an unconventional style:

• He uses the first person, but also the collective ‘you’ to address not the individual reader, but humanity as a whole. This can be seen in the quote above.

• At times, Death uses bullet points to quickly outline people, stolen objects, beliefs, and more. This is an interesting literary device that reinforces Death’s inhuman presence (that is, Death is not human and does not adhere to conventional human narrative structures), though it may not appeal to every reader.

• Likewise, Death frequently ‘interrupts’ the flow of the story with clearly presented ‘intermissions.’ These are always centred on the page, given an all-caps title, and contain Death’s translations, opinions, or recollections. In some cases, these intermissions follow his account of how a character—now only marginally relevant to the story—died.

• Finally, there are also ergodic elements. For example, when Death recalls the three colours present when he first met Liesel (red, white, black), and introduces them through a list with small drawings (a flag, a circle, a symbol). When Max Vandenburg writes an illustrated story for Liesel, the thirteen drawn pages are included as the story itself, rather than being supplementary material, as it’d be done in an illustrated book.

• Something that struck me is how this book consistently presents events in a quiet way that requires the reader to dwell on detail. Death, being neither human nor aligned with any particular flag, presents facts alongside subtle commentary—and it is within these moments that a spectrum of meaning emerges.

For example, when Liesel realises that her biological mother was a Communist and may have been taken by the NSDAP—even though she was German—she exclaims, “I hate the Führer” during a book burning held to celebrate his birthday. Hans, her father, slaps her across the face in public, forces her to stand, and makes her perform the salute alongside him.

Has Hans changed his beliefs? Death offers no explicit commentary beyond this:

It was quite a sight—an eleven-year-old girl, trying not to cry on the church steps, saluting the Führer as the voices over Papa’s shoulder chopped and beat at the dark shape in the background.

This moment exemplifies the book’s subtlety. By this point, readers already know that Hans is opposed to the NSDAP, yet is still waiting for his long-delayed party application to be approved because it offers a measure of safety. The reader also knows that Hans has helped Jewish people before, and Death has already hinted—this time less subtly—that Hans will hide a Jewish man in his basement within the year.

From here, it is left to the reader to infer Hans’s motivations: protecting Liesel, who at eleven years old has no understanding of the broader political context or the danger of making such statements in public, surrounded as they were by loyal party members.

Thematically, the book explores meaning, the power of words, and the duality of humankind: the extremes we reach to protect others, and the extremes we reach when radicalised by belief. It is baffling—and it baffles Death, who reflects on this more than once throughout the novel.

All in all, this is an excellent book.

About the Rating

I ultimately withheld a five-star rating for two details related to Death’s narration, both of which are a matter of personal taste. At the beginning of the novel, Death has a truly distinctive voice; however, in my view, this voice dilutes toward the middle section, before returning in the final third. Likewise, while Death’s commentary on the broader historical context is often subtle, he occasionally labels Liesel’s internal states too clearly and neatly by comparison.

This review was originally posted on Goodreads on December 29th, 2025. Yes, I was reading this over the holiday break, followed by Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl. Do not judge me.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

The story centres on the Radch:

—a human-led empire spanning several regions of the galaxy. It is ruled by an Emperor (the Lord of the Radch, Anaader Mianaai), and built on a multi-deity pantheon of gods—similar as the Roman Empire. This society is highly classist and reminiscent of patrician structures in ancient Rome, with high-born houses extending patronage to those of lesser status, thereby expanding their networks of influence.

The military forms a fundamental pillar of Radchaai society. This is an expansionist empire, intent on conquering—or, in its own terms, “annexing”—other human, non-Radchaai planets. As such, most citizens serve in some capacity. Entry into service requires passing the ‘aptitudes’, a particular form of assessment. The novel hints at an ongoing debate as to whether these aptitudes are biased—either in favour of the “well-bred” or of “provincial upstarts”, depending on which character is voicing the opinion. Regardless, as with many other commentaries, this is mentioned in passing and never truly addressed.

The central element is the Radchaai fleet itself. Each vessel is equipped with a sentient AI, capable not only of emotion but of inhabiting multiple human bodies known as ‘ancillaries’. The procurement of these bodies is unethical (they’re captives taken during the annexations) and certainly not consensual—another concern noted in a handful of comments but never developed in depth.

That said, these ancillaries—these bodies—function as extensions of the AI’s single consciousness, creating a distributed, multi-bodied identity.

This leads to several interesting elements.

In particular, the book is narrated in first-person past-tense, following the last surviving ancillary of the Justice of Toren—a troop carrier destroyed twenty years before the book’s events. The story is split between the events leading to the destruction (past timeline, with the Ship as the narrator) and the present timeline (with ancillary Breq/One Esk as narrator).

What I need to praise is the execution of the almost omniscient presence of the Ship in the past timeline. In a handful of scenes, the conversations or events reflect the multi-spacial awareness, hopping from place to place in each paragraph—for example, Justice may be talking to its captain with one ancillary, while another is serving tea to a Lieutenant, another escorting someone else, a last one running to deliver a message. The execution is neat, novel, and never abused.

However, one of my main grievances is around the execution of the central theme:

The idea of fragmented or multi-body identities.

Early on, the book presents a curiosity: one of Justice’s units, One Esk, has developed a penchant for singing, which the other units do not share—hinting that there is some degree of individuality or fragmenting identity. Likewise, these units (such as One Esk) can have ‘preferences’ towards specific humans that are not shared by the Ship as a whole.

More interestingly even, the Lord of the Radch—allegedly a human, not an AI—has ‘cloned’ herself to exist in multiple bodies thus ensuring her continuance throughout millennia. However, after ordering the genocide of a specific society (the Garsedd), her identity split due to the weight of the decision. This division led the Lord to fight a secret “war” against herself.

Unfortunately, there is very little commentary about either: (a) the philosophical and psychological implications of Anaader’s identity split, and (b) what does it mean for Justice of Toren> that only a segment of it (the ancilliary Breq) survived.

Granted, there are some quotable and philosophical sentences:

...or is anyone’s identity a matter of fragments held together by a convenient or useful narrative, that in ordinary circumstances never reveals itself as a fiction? Or is it really a fiction?

But from the moment of the theme’s breakthrough onwards—when both ‘identity splits’ are revealed—the narrative just... forgets about the implications entirely, as if the author had shied away from the thematic complexity she wove into the plot.

For example, ancillary Breq comments on ‘grieving’ part of her self... but we are never shown the pain, just informed of it by one or two lines of thought, always centred on the awkwardness of having a single body. Likewise, Breq never wonders whether she lost something else, or if she’s truly herself (Justice of Toren) or a new self that resulted from the split.

Were the narrator omniscient, this might be forgivable. Instead, because the story is limited to Breq’s first-person perspective, the lack of exploration of her identity (along with other elements such as the emotional dissonance between Breq’s actions and interiority) reads less like subtlety and more like an unresolved pretense: the theme is suggested, but never probed in depth.

Another of my grievances…

…is the existence of extremely convenient elements that favour Breq or result in events that align with her goals. I’ll give you two examples.

As I mentioned above, there are two timelines: the past (detailing the events leading to the destruction of Justice of Toren), and the present, following Breq on her revenge quest.

The present timeline begins with Breq discovering a drugged, near-dead individual sprawled at the entrance of a tavern in a far away world. Breq recognises this person as a former Radch Captain Seivarden and—for reasons unknown to herself—decides to help Seivarden.

Eventually, it is Seivarden’s presence that allows Breq to stand face-to-face with the subject of her revenge—extremely convenient, given that Breq still had the intelligence of an AI, and had spent two decades plotting this revenge.

Through the book, it is clear that Anaader Mianaai, the Lord of the Radch, was capable of implanting ‘secret’ instructions on the AI’s minds. Thus, there is a chance that Mianaai had implanted something... but the book does not raise suspicions, and leaves this open entirely. Likewise, Seivarden seems strangely attached to Breq for no reason—and Breq merely comments on it once and lets it be.

Given that this is a trilogy, this could be a setup for something else—especially given the above breadcrumbs. Unfortunately, the opening is too fortuitous, and the text does not offer enough foreshadowing as to indicate that there was a purpose beyond something convenient to the plot.

Likewise, towards the end of the book, Breq makes some questionable choices and, for some reason or another, the consequences of her actions are cleaned up in her favour. For example, on a depressurising shuttle, a sail-pod happens to be nearby to rescue her just on time.

While Radch society’s belief in omens and fate provides a thin thematic justification, the reliance on these conveniences stretches plausibility and highlights the tension between the novel’s ambitious themes and its narrative mechanics.

That said, certain aspects of the setting are particularly well realised.

For instance, whenever the Radchaai annex a new society, they argue that local deities are merely incarnations of Radchaai gods—echoing the strategies of the Roman Empire. Similarly, the novel conveys a distinctive and consistent sense of fashion and etiquette, using jewellery to indicate affiliations and patronages. Non-verbal communication seems standardised and it often accompanies speech through gestures, adding depth to social interactions.

Perhaps the most distinctive and frequently discussed element is the treatment of gender. Radchaai society does not recognise gendered traits (such as mannerisms, fashion, accents, or interests), and therefore employs a neutral pronoun for all individuals. In the English ‘translation’ from Radchaai, this generic pronoun is rendered as she/her. The choice has provoked debate among readers, but it also functions as meta-commentary: why should the male pronoun be considered default?

This approach also produces secondary effects that enrich the world-building. Radchaai citizens often struggle with pronouns in other languages or regions, since annexed provinces may signal gender differently. Traits considered ‘female’ in one society may register as ‘male’ or ‘neutral’ in another, highlighting the subtle interplay between language, perception, and social interaction.

This linguistic sensitivity is reminiscent, to some degree, of Samuel Delany’s Babel-17. It is also a reasonable assumption that distinct societies develop different traits and languages—an element of speculative fiction that is too often overlooked in favour of simplified, monolithic cultures.

All in all…

While the first half of the book promises thematic richness and delves head-on into it, the second half does not deliver. Instead, it shifts towards a more conventional narrative structure, leaving many of these ideas insufficiently explored. This creates a sense of imbalance, as though the novel gestures towards complexity but ultimately retreats from it.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

Let’s get this book undone.

Hello everyone, and welcome to Books Undone. I’m your host, Livia J. Elliot, and today we are discussing a standalone body horror novel that has swiped the world: Tender Is The Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica. If you’ve listened to the podcast before, you may have noticed that I don’t tend to cover horror novels, but the truth is this book drew my attention after reading some interesting (and polarising) commentary about it.

The prose is distinctive, and though the body horror is present—and at times graphic—it never exceeds what is necessary to explore the novel’s themes and central critique. That critique, in my view, is not simply the vegan allegory some readers assume it to be. Rather, the horror serves a more unsettling purpose: it exposes how a precise and bureaucratic use of language can normalise—and render tolerable—even the most intolerable acts. In this sense, the novel’s brutality is not gratuitous but instrumental, revealing how terminology, euphemism, and institutional framing reshape moral perception itself.

But I am getting ahead of myself, because before diving into linguistic theories once again, I want to offer some reassurances:

• Tender Is the Flesh is a dystopian body horror novel centred on a society where some humans are treated as livestock by others. Yes, you heard that correctly. Because of that premise, the book can be pretty disturbing and comes with a very, very long list of content warnings. However, I will not be discussing those graphic elements here. The focus of this episode is strictly on language and linguistics within the world of the novel.

• Because of that, this episode will have relatively partial spoilers. We will look mainly at the setting, the language used in the society, and its cultural impact; although I will touch on some plot points, I will try to share as little as possible. That said, if you think you can handle it, I do recommend reading the novel.

Now, let us cover some trivia about the author and the book.

Tender Is The Flesh was originally published in Spanish under the title of Cadáver Exquisito (namely, Exquisite Corpse) in 2017, by Argentine author Agustina Bazterrica. In the same year, it won the Premio Clarín to Best Novel—a significant and prestigious recognition in its country of origin. It was later translated to English by award-nominated translator Sarah Moses, and received considerably praise by international critics, such as Daniel Kraus from The New York Times Book Reviews and Justine Jordan of The Guardian1.

Since its publication, it has been translated into more than thirty languages, and is estimated to have sold over 600,000 copies in the United States alone.

However, Tender Is The Flesh is not the author’s first novel either, since before that, Agustina Bazterrica published a number of short-stories in different magazines and anthologies. In 2020 she was also awarded the Ladies of Horror Fiction Award for Best Novel—an interesting development, given her book was (according to my findings) the only translated work to have won this award.

With that said, let’s dive into the setting.

Tender Is The Flesh opens by revealing that, at some point in the near future, a virus infected all animals in the world—from birds to cats and dogs, rabbits, cattle, everything except humans. The virus is known as GGB, and although the acronym is never explained, it is made clear that being bitten or scratched by an infected animal is fatal to humans, just as it is consuming them.

The protagonist, Marcos Tejo, recalls the following:

He remembers when they announced the existence of GGB. The mass hysteria, the suicides, the fear. After GGB, animals could no longer be eaten because they’d been infected by a virus that was fatal to humans. That was the official line. The words carry the weight necessary to mold us, to suppress all questioning, he thinks.
Barefoot, he walks through the house. After GGB, the world changed definitively. They tried vaccines, antidotes, but the virus resisted and mutated. He remembers articles that spoke of the revenge of the vegans, others about acts of violence against animals, doctors on television explaining what to do about the lack of protein, journalists confirming that there wasn’t yet a cure for the animal virus.

It may be difficult to grasp the magnitude of the problem, so let me show you some statistics to put things into perspective. Various studies (in the real world, of course) estimated that—by 2023—between 78-90% of the global population regularly consumed meat, with some countries, such as United States, consuming about 122.80 kilograms of meat per capita per year2. Since Tender is The Flesh is set in the real world, these statistics reveal something important: given the GGB virus, there was a lot of food to substitute.

And because this is a dystopia, the solution that emerged was… not precisely ethical.

The first thing that happened was that animals were slaughtered: birds, cattle, wild animals, pets—everything was put down to ensure humans were not infected. Next came suspicion and unrest. Naturally, most people were sceptical of the GGB virus, with some dismissing it as a conspiracy theory, while others were far more concerned with the prospect of losing access to meat… and so they sought it by other means. Marcos Tejo recalls this:

Groups of people had started killing others and eating them in secret. The press documented a case of two unemployed Bolivians who had been attacked, dismembered, and barbecued by a group of neighbors. When he read the news, he shuddered.[…]
In some countries, immigrants began to disappear in large numbers. Immigrants, the marginalized, the poor. They were persecuted and eventually slaughtered. Legalization occurred when the governments gave in to pressure from a big-money industry that had come to a halt. They adapted the processing plants and regulations. Not long after, they began to breed people as animals to supply the massive demand for meat.

Given that this novel is set in the near-future, and considering the social hierarchies we already have in place, it is perhaps unsurprising which social groups were the first to be targeted.

However, I want to pause here to redirect your attention to the tone of the excerpt—it was taken verbatim from Sarah Moses’ translation, but… don’t you think it reads factual? Clinical or even detached? The narrator is limited: we see events through Marcos Tejo’s view who, at the time the GGB was announced, was a first-year student in university—which means he lived through all of the “Transition” (as the book refers to it). Yet… he expresses no dismay. He recalls how humans began to be “bred for consumption” (as the novel puts it), yet his account is as unemotional as a Wikipedia summary. Hold on to that idea; I’ll refer back to it very soon.

In the meantime, we must discuss how the governments came to “adapt processing plants and regulations” to, you know, “process” (as per the book’s language) the newly acquired livestock of… humans.

While Marcos recalls the “massive protests, hunger strikes, [and] complaints filed by human rights organization” he also notes that “the population and poverty had been reduced, and there was meat” although “malnutrition was on the rise”—a not-so-minor inconvenience that forced the government to adopt drastic measures to ensure the new “product” (as the novel calls it) was accepted by the population.

Do you know what they did? We could summarise it as a marketing stunt, but the implications are far more complex… and far less funny. Here’s how Marcos introduces it:

The government, his government, decided to rebrand the product. They gave human meat the name ‘special meat.’ Instead of just ‘meat,’ now there’s ‘special tenderloin,’ ‘special cutlets,’ ‘special kidneys.’
He doesn’t call it special meat. He uses technical words to refer to what is a human but will never be a person, to what is always a product. To the number of heads to be processed, to the lot waiting in the unloading yard, to the slaughter line that must run in a constant and orderly manner, to the excrement that needs to be sold for manure, to the offal sector. No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.

That is, actually, the end of the first chapter… and I must pause here again because there is much to unpack:

• What the government did was to—quite literally—rename the new “product”. The text is quite explicit; Marcos used the word “rebrand.”

• This rebranding was carefully done. If you pay attention to the selected words, you can see it is vocabulary that most people were already familiar with—words that had been, for too long, associated with cattle. Namely: tenderloin, cutlets, and so on… “Tenderloins.” That’s a product you can pick up neatly packaged in the supermarket, right? You don’t need to know where it comes from, how it’s processed… you just have a rough idea of what it is: meat. This is where the linguistic horror begins to slip in because we, as readers, know very well that this ’tenderloin’ did not come from cattle. Or at least not the cattle we know.

• Yet the rebranding extended beyond consumer-facing words. It also changed the vocabulary related to the process and regulations—everything that the workers, inspectors, and legislators would be using.

• Therefore, as Marcos explained, these workers (butchers) would be processing… “heads” (remember what Marcos said: you cannot call them “humans”!), and senators would be discussing the “process” not mass-murder. The in-book government also relied on familiar vocabulary because, at the end of the day, the process itself didn’t really change; there were “lots,” a “slaughter line,” and “excrement” or “manure.” Again, words we associate to cattle.

Which brings us to the point where the dark humour fades, giving way to the central theme of Tender Is The Flesh: that the way we think about events and the words we use to describe specific actions, can quote-on-quote ‘shield’ a person from the moral implications of their behaviour. Furthermore, as I hinted at the start, the use of bureaucratic language has an additional effect.

We could also argue this is why Marcos—even though he seems to disagree with the language resulting from this rebranding—sounds like a factual Wikipedia summary. Without being consciously aware of it, and even at the outset of the novel, he’s already suffering the consequences of this rebranding.

Which consequences? Moral detachment. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First, we must understand that language influences thoughts and emotions.

Its power goes beyond providing the vocabulary for precise communication. It also shapes ethics, morality, and the distance we place between ourselves and uncomfortable realities—especially when we take part on that uncomfortable reality.

Remember the line I used to open the episode:

There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.

We will return to this again since it’s rich in meaning. However, what matters now is the implication that some words are “convenient” and “hygienic.” As I hinted before, words (and the meaning they carry) impact someone’s mind—and Marcos, like the rest of society, is being reshaped by this linguistic rebranding, even when he can understand the horror of it.

Let us consider a few excerpts.

Marcos works at a Processing Plant organising sales and purchases, which requires him to visit places where this vocabulary has become exceedingly common. Early in the book, he arrives to a tannery, hears how the owner (Mr Urami) speaks of the “leather” to process, and thinks the following:

Urami’s words construct a small, controlled world that’s full of cracks. A world that could fracture with one inappropriate word.

Notice this: “a controlled world.” Controlled, in part, by the language produced through the government’s rebranding because what is happening—humans bred as livestock—remains ‘acceptable’ and ’tolerable’ only so long as this vocabulary is maintained. This is why Marcos notes that the system could “fracture with one inappropriate word”: the moment people consciously recognise that “heads” are actually humans, and that “special meat” once belonged to someone like them would be a moment of moral and ethical reckoning brought by something we may refer to as the collapse of linguistic distance.

What that collapse truly means, and its implications, is what I’ll eventually discuss.

For now, let me show you another excerpt. This is what Marcos thinks when talking to the owner of a breeding centre:

They’re light words, they weigh nothing. They’re words he feels mix with others that are incomprehensible, the mechanical words spoken by an artificial voice, a voice that doesn’t know that all these words can conceal him, even suffocate him.

Another detail to notice: “all these words can conceal him.” It’s a strange turn of phrase, and one intended to be read metaphorically. People’s minds are shrouded by words, even protected by them—which is why the words ‘conceal’ the people from the ’truth’ (namely, what the words truly mean). However, for someone who cannot simply lose that awareness, the new vocabulary can be “suffocating” because—to them—language cannot hide the underlying moral dilemma.

There is a name for the manner of speech Marcos implies. Something defined by researchers but originally derived from another dystopian novel. It is called:

Doublespeak, and it was derived from George Orwell’s Newspeak, as used in the novel 1984.

You may not know this, but Orwell actually worked as a propagandist, so he was quite aware of the quote-on-quote ’techniques’ used in that line of work. This is why Newspeak is such an important part of 1984, to the point he dedicated an entire Appendix to it in the original novel.

Regardless, George Orwell did not create the concept of doublespeak—one linguist did, by taking into account two other terms that appear in the novel:

• Doublethink, which refers to the ability of simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind, and accepting both of them. And,

• Newspeak, which is the name of the language defined by Ingsoc with the sole goal of “narrowing the range of thought.”

Therefore, if we take the “double” concept of doublethink and the “speak” part of newspeak… we arrive to doublespeak3.

This is what linguist William Lutz did in 1987, on his seminal essay on doublespeak. Two years later, in 1989, he published the “Notes Toward a Definition of Doublespeak”, where he argued that doublespeak: “is language which pretends to communicate but really does not. It is language which makes the bad seem good, something negative appear positive, something unpleasant appear attractive, or at least tolerable. It is language which avoids or shifts responsibility; language which is at variance with its real and its purported meaning; language which conceals or presents thought. Doublespeak is language which does not extend thought but limits it.”4

Notice what Lutz wrote: “language which is at variance with its real and its purported meaning”. This implies that words with a positive meaning are used to refer to a concept that has a negative connotation. Using an example taken from 1984, the word love has two different meanings:

• The real one is itself—the intense feeling of deep affection—but,

• The purported meaning of the word love is actually torture and brainwashing. This is something you can see through the famous Ministry of Love, responsible for terror, torture and brainwashing of political dissidents.

With that clear, we can return to the seminal definition by William Lutz. Towards the end, he used quite a conspicuous word, saying that doublespeak is “language which conceals […] thought”. If you recall, in Tender Is The Flesh, Bazterrica wrote “all these words can conceal him.”

Is it a straight reference to doublespeak? Or perhaps a literary nod to 1984? I can neither confirm nor deny it but it does look suspiciously like one. Even more if you consider Marcos’ quote—the one I told you we’ll return to:

There are words that are convenient, hygienic. Legal.

Words that are “legal”.

Similar as to what happened in 1984, with Ingsoc developing Newspeak and enforcing it on the Party Members, the in-book government of Tender Is The Flesh performed a rebranding, legalised it (through, you know, the Senate and other democratic means), and enforced it by establishing legal penalties. Both are cases of language enforced by political authorities trying to normalise actions of dubious ethics. Both enforced doublespeak… and neither book was precisely fictional in its use of this manner of speech.

Awful as it sounds, doublespeak is often deliberate, institutionalised, and used in contexts where linguistic distance must be created in order to enable moral detachment.

And, unfortunately, this is not a ‘modern’ concept either. In fact, researchers were already studying this phenomenon long before the turn of the century. For example:

• In 1977, Luis Grand published an essay titled “Public Doublespeak: Badge Language, Realityspeak, and the Great Watergate Euphemism Hunt”.

• In 1982, R. Y. Okamura published “Concentration Camps: A Cover-Up Through Euphemistic Terminology”.

• And in 1987, Paul Chilton published “Metaphor, Euphemism, and the Militarisation of Language”5.

What these papers demonstrate is the type of institutions that tend to rely on doublespeak. Unsurprisingly: military organisations, politicians, and legislators.

You can open almost any newspaper and find examples of it. During wartime, for instance, politicians rarely speak of ‘civilian deaths’, but instead refer to ‘collateral damage’; likewise, a ‘kill’ becomes ’neutralisation’, and ’torture’ may be ’enhanced interrogation’. Sometimes, the language becomes even more evasive through passive constructions: they won’t say “someone was killed” but instead report that “a target was neutralised”.

Much like the real versus purported meaning of the word “love” in 1984, terms such as ’neutralising’, ‘collateral’, and ‘interrogation’ sound neutral. Technical. Exactly as Marcos describes in Tender Is the Flesh: convenient and hygienic.

But why was doublespeak needed?

It’s not a single reason, but a chain of them.

First, as Marcos mentioned, “malnutrition was on the rise” so the governments faced some degree of social pressure to provide food. Second, and you can probably guess: economic pressure and the need for profit. Marcos made it very clear:

Legalization occurred when the governments gave in to pressure from a big-money industry that had come to a halt.

But this “big-money industry” now required something intrinsically amoral: the enslavement and mass-murdering of “heads”. Doublespeak was the only thing that would allow them to make this horror acceptable enough by managing the reputational cost of legalising and working in such industry, and affecting the emotional experiences of workers and consumers alike.

Let’s break this down.

In 2021, linguist Alexander C. Walker demonstrated that: “a strategic speaker can, through the careful use of language, sway the opinions of others in a preferred direction while avoiding many of the reputational costs associated with less subtle forms of linguistic manipulation”6.

This is, to some extent, what the government in Tender Is The Flesh was doing: by changing the language around… “special meat” and their livestock of… “heads” (not “humans”, remember!) they were minimising the reputational implications of what they had just legalised. This would protect not only the government’s image, but also make the work more appealing—otherwise, nobody would want to legislate this, work as a butcher, stunner, or breeder, or even clean a processing plant. Without workers there would be no industry and way to produce any supply.

In addition to that, doublespeak—or language more generally—affects the emotional impact of an event or action. In 2017, Jeffrey A. Brooks demonstrated “that labeling one’s emotional experiences and perceptions alters those states”, also noting that “in the absence of accessible emotion concepts, the meaning of affective experiences and perceptions are ambiguous”7.

What this highlights is the relationship between the words we use and the emotions we experience, including how intensely we experience them. Doublespeak relies on this link. By replacing morally-charged words with neutral or positive ones, it reframes unethical or disturbing acts in language that feels procedural, technical, and emotionally distant. In other words, the more bureaucratic the vocabulary becomes, the more bureaucratic the act itself appears.

This is precisely what the government’s rebranding in Tender Is the Flesh sought to achieve. The consumption of “special meat” is presented as something routine—administrative, even—much like the meat industry that existed before, only with new terminology for the cuts. The reason is simple: this “big-money industry” (as Marcos put it) required consumers who would demand its product. If ordinary meat-eaters could be persuaded to accept “special meat”, then the state’s nutritional crisis would be solved, the industry would have a demand to satisfy, and the system would sustain itself.

Marcos was quite explicit about the emotional impact of words. He said:

No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food.

And later the people themselves understood how language was being used and began to propose terms to make everything more palatable. Here’s what Marcos recalls:

Before long, people began to ask for front or hind trotters, using the cuts of pork to refer to upper and lower extremities. The industry took this as permission and started to label products with these euphemisms that nullified all horror.

This nullification of horror through language—and the linguistic distance it creates—is how moral disengagement happens.

In 1999, Albert Bandura published a paper titled “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities”8. This paper discussed the psychological process allowing individuals to engage in harmful behaviors without feeling guilt or remorse—something achieved after separating moral reactions from inhumane conduct and disabling the mechanism of self-condemnation.

As you can imagine, language and—in particular—doublespeak are essential mechanisms to achieve moral disengagement.

Back in 1975, a group of researchers demonstrated that, through intricate rephrasing, detrimental behaviour can be made to appear more innocuous and acceptable—to the point that those involved may feel less personal guilt about their actions9. This returns us to the kind of bureaucratic language we saw in the military examples: ’neutralisation’, ’targets’, ‘assets’, ‘interrogation’. These terms exist for a reason. They frame actions in technical or procedural terms, allowing institutions to describe difficult or morally-charged actions in a way that emphasises their operational role rather than their emotional consequences.

And this is exactly what Tender Is The Flesh does: it exaggerates the linguistic distance to demonstrate how a society can become desensitised, while the readers experience how language itself becomes the infrastructure for violence.

What makes this a dystopia is the moral disengagement at a societal level.

Tender Is The Flesh is not about a group of outlaw cannibals hunting respectable citizens. It is about a world that has legalised the practice under a handful of morally palatable justifications—fighting malnutrition, creating jobs, sustaining the economy—while extensively manipulating language to make it acceptable… and ultimately succeeding in doing so.

The logic was disturbingly simple:

1. Step One, change the language.

2. Step Two, embed the new vocabulary in laws, industry terminology, advertising, and everyday conversation. Once everyone uses the same words, the reframing becomes social reality.

3. Step Three, change the category, and therefore the moral rules. Once something is linguistically classified as food, the ethical prohibition against killing people disappears within that framework.

Which leads us to a chilling conclusion: sometimes, changing the words is all it takes to change the rules. At the end of the day, language does not merely describe reality; within systems, it can make violence acceptable.

Before closing off…

I want to acknowledge that there are so many more themes in this book, but I couldn’t include them all—either because of space, or because it required delving into something more explicit. To name a few:

• Throughout the plot, the book presents a latent contradiction in society. Namely, people do things that require them to acknowledge that “heads” are actually “humans”, while simultaneously using the curated language of the rebranding. This can be a reference to doublethink (simultaneously holding two contradictory beliefs in mind). I decided not to cover this given how explicit some examples are.

• Likewise, regardless of how aware Marcos may be about the language, his internal narrative does not truly follow that focus. For example, his actions demonstrates that he cares more about his late dogs or some puppies he found in an abandoned zoo, rather than a female “head” that was gifted to him. This can be another example of doublethink, but it also speaks about how his morals are corrupted even though he thinks they’re not.

• The treatment of female “heads” in this book is appalling, and incredibly grotesque. There is room to discuss the use of female bodies as objects, and how women are reduced to “producers of children”.

• It is possible to read the existence of “heads” as a reference to slavery. In particular, one chapter takes places in a game reserve, and the way the hunters take photos with their… ehm, “acquisitions” resembles quite closely some photos taken before the abolition of slavery.

There is more still, but I was not attempting to be exhaustive. What matters is that Tender Is The Flesh is a nuanced and layered book that goes far beyond the body horror that tends to take the forefront in most reviews.

That said, if language as a topic interests you, then allow me to tell you a secret: language is one of my most discussed topics in Books Undone, so there are three episodes I want to share with you:

• Through Babel-17 by Samuel Delaney, I discussed how language shapes thought, using both Sapir-Whorf hypotheses (known as linguistic determinism and relativity). This was actually the third episode of the podcast, back in 2023.

• Of course, I did a thorough discussion on Newspeak from 1984 by George Orwell. This episode complements some of the themes in the one I mentioned previously. It also includes some interesting trivia on Orwell himself.

• Among the most recent ones is my discussion on metaphors, lies, and mental abstraction as presented in Embassytown by China Miéville. This is quite a long episode, but one of my favourites.

You can find the transcript for all the episodes—plus thorough literary analyses of speculative fiction—in my Substack at liviajelliot.substack.com. I post weekly, and the podcast is included in the publication. I will leave the link in the description.

Thanks for listening, and happy reading.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

It is often presented as a book about religion and—to put it in modern terms—perhaps incensepunk. I, however, wouldn’t go that far. Miller leveraged satirical elements at many points (though I’d be hesitant to call this only a satire) to critique the Catholic Church, as well as our tendency to succumb to dogma without any attempt to question the truth beneath it. If anything, it is more social science fiction than anything else—and not precisely kind in its portrayal.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The novel is divided into three sections, each titled in Latin: Fiat Homo (namely, “let it be human” / “let there be men”), Fiat Lux (”let there be light”), and Fiat Voluntas Tua (”let it be your will”). The first section takes place approximately 600 years after a nuclear holocaust, likely to have occurred somewhere around the 1970-80s. The following two sections are set 600 years apart from each other.

The first section, Fiat Homo, begins in the post-apocalyptic dark ages.

Much of what occurred during that cataclysm has been lost to history, surviving only through myths and legends. The reason for this is that, after the nations destroyed one another, the surviving population adopted a strikingly anti-intellectual stance. Rather than confronting their own indirect responsibility—whether through electing the politicians who led them to ruin, or remaining politically disengaged—they concluded that knowledge itself (physics, chemistry, computer science, etc.) had been the root cause of humanity’s suffering.

Thus began the Age of Simplification.

During this period, politicians, researchers, educators, and eventually anyone who could read or write—including school teachers—were systematically hunted down and killed. In an effort to survive, many sought refuge within the Church and its monasteries, taking holy orders to escape persecution.

This was the case for Leibowitz, a scientist. The novel reveals little about him directly, though it is strongly implied that he was a Jewish engineer who played a role in developing the bomb responsible for the cataclysm, drawing an intentional parallel with Oppenheimer. Following the death of his wife, he sought sanctuary within the Church. Eventually, he returned to the desert—somewhere near present-day Denver—alongside several companions to recover and conceal books. “Until humanity is ready again,” was their motto.

By the time of the Fiat Homo section, the Albertian Order founded by Leibowitz possesses its own abbey and preserves a collection known as the Memorabilia: texts and records of the “ancients” recovered and hidden by Leibowitz and his followers. Leibowitz himself has since been declared a Beatus.

But here comes the tragedy of the setting: the monks protect the documents and work to preserve them... but they don’t truly understand what the documents mean. As an abbot thinks:

How much of it had been reduced to gibberish, embellished with olive leaves and cherubims, by forty generations of us monastic ignoramuses, children of dark centuries, many entrusted with a message to be memorised and delivered.

This forms one of the novel’s central ideas: that scientific knowledge—whether in the sciences, the humanities, or any other discipline—depends upon both contextual understanding and collective memory. Ultimately, knowledge cannot exist in isolation; it is shaped by the society in which it develops and by what each generation preserves and passes on to the next.

The monks living after the Age of Simplification possess the surviving books, yet they are incapable of making practical use of them because two essential pieces of the puzzle are missing: the social context in which that knowledge once existed, and the accumulated cultural memory needed to interpret it.

As the abbot explains:

Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible-that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense [...] or Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded [...]

Therefore, what little remains known about the world before the Flame Deluge—the nuclear catastrophe itself—has become inseparable from myth and mysticism. Many scenes throughout the novel illustrate this cultural regression. The “Fallout”, for instance, is commonly understood as a “demon”, imagined as a salamander-like creature... while wandering hunter-gatherers roam the wastelands breaking apart ancient “rocks” (concrete) to retrieve the metal rods hidden within them—fragments of long-decayed structures whose original purpose they cannot possibly comprehend.

Likewise, in a society where literacy is rare outside the monasteries—and where being a “simpleton” is regarded almost as a virtueven human suffering is interpreted through superstition. The descendants of those exposed to radiation are viewed as “children of the fallout-demon”, not out of cruelty alone, but out of profound ignorance. The novel makes it abundantly clear that this civilisation lacks even the most elementary scientific concepts, including chemistry, electricity, and thus radiation itself. They witness the consequences of these forces without possessing the intellectual framework required to understand them.

It is here that one of the novel’s most compelling dualities emerges: although the characters interpret the world through myth, the reader is often able to infer the underlying truth through context and common sense. I will give one example below, within spoiler tags.

During Homo Lux, the monks read this ‘historical record’:

[…] that the princes of Earth had hardened their hearts against the Law of the Lord, and of their pride there was no end.

And each of them thought within himself that it was better for all to be destroyed than for the will of other princes to prevail over his. For the mighty of the Earth did contend among themselves for supreme power over all; by stealth, treachery, and deceit they did seek to rule, and of war they feared greatly and did tremble; for the Lord God had suffered the wise men of those times to learn the means by which the world itself might be destroyed, and into their hands was given the sword of the Archangel wherewith Lucifer had been cast down, that men and princes might fear God and humble themselves before the Most High. But they were not humbled.

With some common sense, modern readers can deduct that the “princes” are likely presidents or prime ministers, and their “pride” possibly extreme nationalism or economic aspirations. In that manner, the “sword of the Archangel” could refer to a weapon of mass destruction. This part: “of war they feared greatly and did tremble” could indicate the understanding of the threat of MAD (mutually assured destruction), something often discussed during the post-war era and the Cold War.

Curiously, the monks know that much of these ‘historical’ accounts are not accurate, but they cannot distill the truth out of them. Eventually, this enables a discussion on whether humanity can learn from a past that has been mangled by distorted accounts retold and ‘adjusted’ through the centuries.

Leave a comment

Reconstructing lost knowledge becomes the central theme of the second section: Fiat Lux (”let there be light”).

On one level, an inventive monk succeeds in recreating an electrical generator—a dynamo—to power a lightbulb: the novel’s most literal expression of light. He achieves this not through genuine scientific advancement, but by painstakingly inferring forgotten principles from fragmented books, diagrams, and blueprints.

At the same time, a secular scholar arrives at the abbey to study the Memorabilia, hoping to usher in a new age of enlightenment: the metaphorical light of knowledge and reason. In doing so, however, he is eventually forced to confront an uncomfortable truth: he is not an inventor of new knowledge, but merely a rediscoverer of what humanity had already lost.

The exchanges between this scholar and the abbot introduce another discussion: humanity’s persistent tendency to distance itself from its own past. The scholar continually constructs elaborate theories intended to separate the present from the civilisation that preceded the Flame Deluge. At various points he speculates that the Memorabilia may be fraudulent, reduces figures such as Einstein to little more than magi or natural philosophers, and even entertains the notion that the “ancients”—the civilisation responsible for the Fallout—may not have been truly human at all.

The abbot answers this:

Why do you wish to discredit the past, even to dehumanising the last civilisation? So that you need not learn from their mistakes?

The idea of whether humanity can learn from its past is an underlying constant in the story.

It is also the central theme of the last section: Fiat Voluntates Tua (”let it be your will”).

It shows how society changed after 600 more years, and how different—or not—it is, 1800 years after the last nuclear holocaust. I will not spoil this part; I’ll only say this: while the first two parts are satirically funny, the last one is darkly truthful to human nature.

Yet these are not the novel’s only concerns.

Although the narrative is largely centred upon the monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz—and many of its rituals deliberately mirror Catholic tradition—the novel is by no means uncritical in its portrayal of religion.

Through irony and satire, Miller frequently draws attention to the institutional absurdities of organised faith, including:

• The bureaucratic machinery surrounding sainthood, particularly the exhaustive effort to gather “evidence” of “miracles” in order to canonise Leibowitz;

• The treatment of books as sacred relics to be venerated rather than understood;

• And the preservation of ritual long after its original meaning has been forgotten. One striking example occurs when the monks activate the dynamo while reciting, in Latin, the passage from Genesis containing the words “let there be light”—the phrase from which the section itself takes its title.

The novel also presents a significant critique of universities and scientific institutions. Though such organisations often portray themselves as neutral or apolitical, Miller criticises how readily they align themselves with political power to preserve influence and funding—even when this cooperation contributes to the development of weapons of mass destruction. In this respect, the book repeatedly hints at a troubling historical pattern: humanity’s greatest discoveries are so often first employed in the service of conflict before later being redirected towards more constructive ends.

At the same time, the novel reflects upon both humanity’s resilience and its capacity for self-destruction. Miller portrays civilisation as stubbornly prone to division, endlessly categorising people into competing groups, ideologies, and identities that produce little beyond hostility and resentment. Governments, likewise, are depicted as willing to accept the devastation of war rather than devote themselves to preventing it in the first place.

To close off…

A Canticle for Leibowitz is far more intellectually and thematically complex than many reviews suggest. Beneath its post-apocalyptic setting lies a remarkably layered discussion on knowledge, memory, religion, war, and humanity’s cyclical tendency towards self-destruction. From its recurring symbolism to its literalised metaphors—including two characters I have deliberately avoided discussing in detail—the novel constantly demands careful attention from the reader.

For that reason, it is also a work that can be easily misunderstood. Miller is rarely interested in offering simple moral answers; instead, he presents a civilisation shaped by contradiction, ignorance, faith, guilt, and historical amnesia, leaving the reader to wrestle with the implications.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

I will first review the narrative, the characters and plot, and then move into the themes.

In terms of narrative, Tender is the Flesh is told in a limited third-person present tense—an unusual choice that generates a dissonance between the apparent proximity to Marcos Tejo’s mind (the narrating character) and the increasing blurring of events in his life.

The author also alternates between presenting dialogue conventionally (using quotation marks) and narrating it in large, dense paragraphs. This choice appears deliberate, as narrated dialogue only surfaces when Marcos ‘spaces out’, disregarding whoever is speaking in favour of his own inner monologue. This works very effectively, particularly because these moments often coincide with gruesome scenes (for instance, Marcos’s tour of a breeding centre of ‘heads’: humans bred for consumption). In these cases, his lack of attention creates a sense of detachment that, by any reasonable moral measure, should not exist—yet it does, because the normalisation of horror is, perhaps, the novel’s central concern.

Which leads us into the plotlines weaving throughout the book:

1. Marcos’s work as the second-hand man to the owner of the Krieg Processing Plant presents the horror of legalised cannibalism, alongside its implications for those dehumanised individuals now designated as ‘products for consumption’. It establishes the setting, but operates as the background of Marcos’s life—the day-job he performs while other, more personally transformative events unfold. This ‘relevance’ says plenty about his character.

2. The death of his child and the departure of his wife, Cecilia, bear down on Marcos. It acts as a catalyst for several narrative developments, including those connected to Jasmine’s storyline.

3. Jasmine’s is arguably the most harrowing, yet also the most relegated. As a high-quality ‘head’ (a human bred for consumption), she is gifted to Marcos... yet despite her market value, he locks her in a barn and tends to her minimally. His disregard culminates in an act of sexual violence, resulting in her pregnancy. I will return to this storyline when discussing the novel’s themes.

4. The central storyline is, in my opinion, the most important: the situation with Don Armando, Marcos’ senile father, now living in an aged care. It shapes much of Marcos’ behaviour, from his line of employment to his visits to an abandoned zoo solely because his father once took him there. Likewise, Armando’s death marks a decisive turning point: the moment when Marcos begins to impose boundaries, sever relationships that burden him, and initiate change.

Thematically, though, this novel is a goldmine.

Leave a comment

It presents extreme horrors through Marcos’ detached, almost bored narrative voice, yet it tempers this detachment with selective ethical concerns—enough ‘morality’ to make him initially relatable, and enough ambiguity to allow it to surface throughout the story. This gradual unveiling of Marcos’ true character can be read as a covert moral test for the reader. What I found particularly effective, is how the author sowed ‘clues’ about Marcos’ ethics from the very beginning, yet hid them in his curated, carefully crafted inner monologue:

No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.

As the story progresses, his language ‘slips’ and becomes blunter—mirroring Marcos’ gradual acceptance of his own feelings towards the ‘heads’. This is especially evident when he bathes Jasmine before naming her:

He cleans her chest, armpits, stomach. Diligently, as though he were cleaning a valuable but inanimate object. He’s nervous, as if the object could break, or come to life.

Her story is uncomfortable and dehumanising. As a ‘head’, her vocal cords have been removed (a practice intended to prevent screaming during slaughter and, likely—though never explicitly stated—to limit communication). She has been branded in the forehead like cattle, and kept in a cage sleeping on hay. When Marcos receives her, she is even wearing a leash and does not attempt to remove it.

Yet the novel uses language effectively to convey Marcos’ discomfort around her: he keeps her out of sight in the barn, tends to her minimally, and considers selling her. It is not until he observes her body that he perceives her differently, going so far as to strip naked in front of her:

He strokes her neck. Now he’s the one who trembles. He removes his jeans and stands there, naked. His breath quickens. He continues to hug her as it rains down. What he wants to do is prohibited. But he does it anyway.

For a book that does not shy away from explicit depictions of extreme horror (which I will not detail here), the scene in which Marcos sexually assaults Jasmine concludes with the passage above. This is particularly striking given that before the novel included two explicit, on-the-page sexual encounters between Marcos and a former lover.

This omission can be read as a reflection of the value Marcos assigns to Jasmine: she is ‘beautiful’, a ‘valuable object’—yet insignificant enough that her rape is excluded not only from the narrative, but from Marcos’ conscience. The text expects the reader to infer what occurs (as well as the subsequent months Marcos spends ‘enjoying’ her), precisely because she is framed as a ‘head’, and nothing more.

The second half of the novel—beginning when Jasmine is eight months pregnant—is harrowing, yet notably restrained in how it exposes her continued dehumanisation. Marcos may sleep with her, fondle her, yet he keeps her locked in a room and monitors her through cameras akin to those commonly used to monitor pets. He still ‘feeds’ Jasmine (rather than ‘serving her food’), and worries about her primarily insofar as she is carrying his child.

His treatment of her as the bearer of his child, rather than as a woman pregnant with his child, opens the door to a broader discussion of objectification, and of the way societies often value a foetus more than the person carrying it.

This brings us back, once again, to language and its role in constructing moral contradiction. At one point, Marcos narrates:

She spends hours watching television, sleeping, drawing, staring at a fixed point. At times, it seems she’s thinking, like she really can.

And yet, only a few pages earlier, he acknowledged that ‘heads’ were, in fact, human:

Before going into the plant, he sits in the car for a few seconds and looks at the complex of buildings. They’re white, compact, and efficient. There’s nothing to indicate that inside them humans are killed.

So is Marcos’s numb detachment a defence mechanism, or an ethical failure? Is he dehumanising because the system is, or because he himself has grown numb?

The novel doesn’t answer these questions. Instead, it presents situations for the reader to craft their own answer—while simultaneously ‘training’ that same reader to accept its language until, by the end, they have learnt to expect the most gruesome crimes against humanity.

It is then when the horror surfaces: when the reader finishes the book and realises that, halfway through, Marcos no longer needed to be subtle with his choice of words.

PS: A podcast episode will be landing soon.

This review was originally shared on Goodreads, on March 2nd, 2026.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.

It is also, by itself, a very ordinary sentence. Nothing about it compels you to keep reading.

Which brings us to one piece of advice every reader and writer has seen repeated ad nauseum—especially when paired with lines extracted, often without context, from books that are now classical1: “The first line of a book should hook you.”

How many times have you heard this? Hundreds of times, if not thousands. Always from educators, connoisseurs, and even in your average YouTube channel. Yet this advice assumes something strange: that readers fall in love with books because of a single sentence.

I beg to differ. Readers remember the first line because everything that follows makes it meaningful: the voice, the atmosphere, the momentum, the themes—the book itself gives the first line its relevance and staying power.

Why?

Because the first line is not a hook, but a retrospective anchor.

Yet before going further, one clarification is due:

My argument applies to long-form fiction only.

Short forms compress meaning. In flash fiction, drabbles, or micro-fiction, every line carries narrative load, and the shorter the form the more pressure falls on each sentence. Here, a weak opening can genuinely collapse the piece.

Novels, however, work differently. They have room to persuade—to accumulate meaning, establish voice, build atmosphere, and gradually draw the reader into an experience. A novel does not win the reader in a sentence; it reminds them of its meaning once they’ve finished reading.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sceptical? Let’s discuss a few examples.

Because first lines can have different purposes, I have grouped the examples by categories—informed by how it impacts a first-time reader (especially one that goes into the book blind and without knowing its contents), what it reflects about the book, and what makes it memorable. Because of this, the grouping is agnostic to genre.

Shall we?

Category 1: Famous lines that are almost empty alone.

I have used this one already, but it’s worth bringing it back. From Moby Dick by Herman Melville:

“Call me Ishmael”

On its own, this line is… neutral at best. It introduces the character and establishes the narrative style—first-person address to the reader—but it does little else. However, once you’ve finished the book, it becomes an existential positioning, a declaration of how one navigates the vast, chaotic world Melville conjures.

Another example comes from The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

This book was written as a ‘fairy story’ with a tone suited for children, but even then it sounds… simple. Without what follows—“Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms…”—it reveals very little. Yet it is iconic because it teaches us what a hobbit is, and immerses the reader into a secondary world.

Imagine this: you have never heard about these books, and you see this line printed in an otherwise empty card. No cover, no blurb, no title, no genre, no details about the book—just that sentence. Would you keep reading?

Category #2: Lines that only make sense after the book.

Of course, I have to bring some of my favourite books.

From Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury2:

It was a pleasure to burn.

At first glance, and without context, this sentence is… edgy. “It was a pleasure to burn.” On its own, it hints at meaning but says almost nothing—what is being burned? Who is doing it?

The next line begins to add detail: “It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists…” It is certainly well written and immediately builds an obsessive tone—yet, again, it is not as powerful as it becomes once you know the full story.

By the end of the novel, though, when you understand that Montag’s pleasure came from burning books, the opening line is chilling—both politically and psychologically. Its impact comes not from the sentence itself, but from everything the book has made you see.

Here’s another dystopia. From 1984 by George Orwell3:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Without context, this is certainly a strange way to start a book. At first, you might notice the clocks striking thirteen—odd, yes, but hardly alarming by itself. It hints that something is off, but you wouldn’t guess how deeply. After finishing the novel, however, that single line compresses everything Big Brother does, including how the Party reshapes reality. What once seemed a small peculiarity becomes a chilling symbol of control.

These two are certainly curious by themselves, but not nearly as powerful as they become once you’ve finished the book.

Category #3: Lines likely to misfire in tone.

Allow me to switch away from dystopias into something else entirely. From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen:

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

Contrary to the prior categories, this opening does hint at what the book would be about, but it may misfire—quite severely, one may argue—in terms of tone. Why? Because Jane Austen often used parody and burlesque elements for comic effect and to critique the portrayal of women her contemporaneous “sentimental novel.” She critiqued social hypocrisy through irony, using what came to be considered, by some, as a “polemical tone.”

Therefore, the opening line of Pride and Prejudice is famous largely because it is perfect Austenian irony—but that irony is only legible if you recognise the novel’s social satire and the author’s style.

The next opening also belongs to a different genre. From The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

Approaching that line without context is likely to cause more confusion than insight. Is it literal or metaphorical? A joke? Satire? A dream, or a waking nightmare?

Just as it happened with the first line of Pride and Prejudice, the opening of The Metamorphosis hints at the central element of the story—but its tone misfires. Many of the questions you might ask at the start remain unresolved even after finishing the book… and that is precisely what makes it iconic: the line’s meaning deepens, and arguably emerges, only once you grasp the social and existential allegory that runs through the novel.

Category #4: Lines just ‘odd’ at first glance.

The two examples I have here are somewhat similar to the case of 1984—there is something odd in them and, even if a reader were to notice the strangeness, its meaning wouldn’t emerge until the end of the book.

From The Road by Cormac McCarthy:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him.

At first glance... this is quaint. It reads interminable, the cadence is unusual, and it prefers to use “he” and “the child” rather than the characters’ names.

If you read closely, though, you may notice the absolute lack of commas—a trait of McCarthy’s writing. However, if you have not read any of his works, this may come across as a merely stylistic choice, or perhaps the obsession of a quaint writer. In truth, after reading the novel, the effects of his stripped-down grammar is evident in the bleak atmosphere of the book. Therefore, one could argue that McCarthy was ‘easing’ the reader into his style; a warning, of sorts.

Yet there is more because this line, stripped down as it is, summarises the central theme of the novel in its choice of words: waking, dark, cold, touch, child. It implies a father reaching for his son in the dark, the need to protect but at the same time to gather his strength to continue living the next day.

Just like before, the grammatical and thematic implications of this opening sentence only become relevant after finishing the book.

Now allow me one more example, the newest among all of these. From Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer:

The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats.

Another example of a long, breathless, comma-less sentence that seems strange—or even anti-climactic—as a book’s opening. On a first reading, its oddities are obvious, yet it’s impossible to imagine the magnitude of the strangeness just from the line itself.

Consider this: “The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth…” Towers go up, not down, right? Modern readers might dismiss the book for that alone—or at least raise a brow and keep reading. More curious is that the remainder of the sentence quickly abandons the so-called tower to focus, with almost excessive detail, on the environment.

This focus only makes sense once you know that the author is famous for eco-fiction, that the narrator is a biologist studying transitional environments, and that Annihilation’s real ‘main character’ is not the narrator but Area X—a strange environment that dominates the novel.

Just as it happened with The Road, this line ultimately summarises the book—but on a first read, its meaning is impossible to guess.

After all, first lines are not hooks but retrospective anchors.

We do not remember these lines because they begin great books.

We remember them because its significance only emerges in retrospect, after we have ventured through the book and formed our understanding of its meaning and themes. Only after ‘The End’ what seemed ordinary or odd in that first line becomes memorable: when we know the story that gives it meaning.

Copyright © 2026 Livia J. Elliot. All rights reserved. This publication is licensed for personal reading only. No article, or substantial part of an article, may be reproduced, republished, adapted, translated, compiled into another publication, incorporated into teaching materials or course packs, or used for AI training without prior written permission. Linking to the original articles is encouraged.