ATDTDA (3): Colic-free sleep, 66-69 #2

[Paul Nightingale]

Dally's insistence on bringing Zombini into the narrative marginalises
Merle: as the Beast he had been, briefly, centre-stage. Now, Dally forces
him to follow Erlys, and he has to acknowledge that speaking for her is both
"unfair" and "impossible". To be a storyteller, then, is to admit his
failure to achieve storytelling omniscience. And this is a story that has
been told more than once; Dally's pleasure derives from the telling, rather
than what is told. By the end of this section father and daughter are alone:
her insistence on the retelling/recycling of what she already knows reminds
me of Freud's fort-da game.

Merle's version of Zombini resembles himself more than a little: the "modest
career", followed by the 'loss' of Roxana. In the telling, then, Erlys
responds to an alternate. To Lew and Blinky, then, in this particular role,
we should now add Zombini, who offers to reveal the magic of his trick, just
as Roswell Bounce showed Merle photography. Moreover, the exchange on 68,
described from Merle's pov, is a little less than clear: Merle assumes
Zombini is talking to him, whereas he could be addressing Erlys throughout.
If indeed Zombini is, effectively, ignoring Merle as he proceeds to seduce
Erlys, reacting to her silence and moving quickly to ask if she has ever
wanted to "suddenly disappear", then this passage emphasises Merle as the
unreliable narrator. That he dismisses Zombini as "just an average-looking
gent" might be taken as special pleading: he had no reason to suspect him.

Erlys "[flicks] a glance ... in Merle's direction". This brings him into the
exchange between Zombini and Erlys in order to expel him as, marginalised,
he goes off to "see to" Dally. He has taken a fork in the road.