14 March 2012
Dear Mr. Carpentier,
As
a class, we have been reading your novel, The Kingdom of this World. As
I was pondering some of the ideas presented, a question came to me. In regards
to the scene in which Soliman finds the body of Pauline Bonaparte, why did
Soliman have to be the person who found her and why did he fail to recognize
that she was deceased?
My
assumption here is that the Piedmontese girl led Soliman to Pauline, but I
cannot decipher the reasoning behind it. The book says, “the chambermaid, with
a provocative gesture, opened a small door and lowered the lantern” (158). She
led him into this room, but I do not know if it was of her own volition or if
she was sent on someone else’s instruction. Admittedly, Soliman was in a
drunken state, but there is not a guarantee that he would have found Pauline’s
body without her leading. He was meant to find her body for some reason, and I
am abundantly curious as to what that reason was.
I
am also curious about why it took Soliman so long to recognize that she was not made of marble – that she was a corpse. The authorial
consciousness tells us that “he touched the marble with eager hands, his sense
of smell and sight in his fingers” (159). He was giving her a massage, but did
not realize that she was a corpse. I think that there are two possible
explanations for this: firstly, that he was in such a drunken stupor that he
did not recognize the softness of her body, or that he chooses not to feel the softness of her body. When he realizes that
it is indeed a corpse he has been massaging, he describes her as a “corpse
newly stiffened, recently stripped of breath and sight, which perhaps there was
still time to being back to life” (160). She was newly dead, her death recent
enough that there was a chance that she could be resuscitated. Why did Soliman
fail to realize this?
I thank you for
your time in reading my letter and I hope to receive an answer from you soon.
With
Best Regards,
Ashley
Gordon
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