The empty face
The Empty Face (OT The Hollow Man ) is a science fiction and horror novel by the American writer Dan Simmons . The original edition was published in 1992 under the title The Hollow Man . The novel is about a mathematician who embarks on a road movie-like odyssey through several US states related to his ability to read everyone's mind.
The novel was nominated for the Locus Award in 1993.
construction
The story develops over several levels. The storylines are structured like separate stories, which, however, explain each other in their nesting and the successive related actions of the individual characters, retrospectively through the memory of Jeremy Bremen. Divided into two main narrative levels, structured as alternating chapters, these relate and complement each other as a continuous narrative of the past and ongoing reality. In the form of chapters inserted in between, there is a third, deviating level in which a first-person narrator who cannot be assigned takes a separate look at the entire structure of the narrative. That makes the arc of suspense interestingly wide.
Jeremy and Gail have the special ability of telepathy and they can read other people's minds. In the course of their being together, they develop a thought screen that protects both of them from excessive intrusion of foreign thoughts. Because of this extreme telepathic connection, they seem to have grown together. Using this symbiotic union, the author builds the construct of an ideal of sexual and spiritual love. However, this is characterized by the physical separation of the people, up to the insurmountable death, as never really perfect, because both still have secrets from each other. As a reader, for long stretches of the portrayal of the suffering of Bremen, one becomes compassionate at the disintegration of this illusion conveyed at the beginning: the projection that one could actually love oneself in a form that overcomes all boundaries, including death. In this novel, Dan Simmons packs possible answers to the most fundamental questions of humanity in a very haunting way. This is transferred to the reader through the description of the inner worlds and the individual perception of his hero. Is there a god? What is the universe What is my role in it? What do good and bad mean. What is the hell He puts the philosophy and psychology of the themes of suffering, death, hell, insanity and that of human happiness, love and life per se, in the context of science and justifies his answers with the events that neural and quantum theoretical research could obviously give.
Therefore, he can see this conflict resolved as a fictional spiritual happy ending, which, due to his pre-formulated theses, theories and fictions, can end in a Garden of Eden without appearing kitschy. But in the end it remains a question of faith, because it is not clear whether he formulated Jeremy's dream or reality. In the foreword by the author he thanks “ Dante Alighieri , John Ciardi , TS Eliot , Joseph Conrad and Thomas Aquinas ”.
action
In the spirit of divine comedy , the novel is about the hero's flight from himself. In this world overcrowded with people, an inferno begins for his perception, the descent into hell. The plot resembles a road movie that, beginning as a psychogram, develops from a thriller to a perverse horror trip until the action leads to a complete breakdown. The hero escapes by waking up in a science fiction fairy tale. With his suicide he then beams himself into a reality in which he is resurrected as a seemingly perfect human being, parable with the beloved woman and the unborn child, which could correspond to the idea of the Christian Trinity as well as the wish for paradise on earth.
The main character, Jeremy Bremen, loses his wife Gail in the course of the story. After her death, Bremen is no longer able to fend off the strange, invading thoughts of the people around him. His thought screen collapses. He sinks into a deep depression. As a mathematician and a respected lecturer at the University of Philadelphia, he and Gail had lived a very intense love before the disease broke out, a symbiosis that was very fruitful for his scientific work. By visiting the renowned neuroscientist Jacob Goldmann together, the two scientists find the solution to the problem in the form of the other's research results. By putting the results together, you will find the puzzle piece that explains everything. After this encounter, Bremen delves more and more into chaos mathematics , which apparently could answer the last questions of humanity. Shortly before the death of his wife, he thus discovered the equations that everything could explain: how the brain, thinking produces what mind is what memories are what the Spirit brings the people and how all this with the functioning of the universe are related could. He has to stop his work when Gail is almost unable to read his mind. He remains with her in the form of his spirit touch until her end. When she dies, part of himself dies. His thought screen collapses. He is thrown into a state of deepest psychological suffering by the now striking neurobabble, which flows into his brain from the innumerable thoughts of people. Thrown back so brutally on himself and his no longer controllable ability, he leaves everything behind and goes into the martyrdom of the most agonizing soul. The lowest waves of thought pull him deeper and deeper into the most primitive existence in the world, which is shaped by strange thoughts that stem from the existence around him in violence, suffering, illness, lust, mistrust, greed, stupidity, envy and immense brutality. The beginning of his odyssey begins with him setting fire to his farm and fleeing.
He ends up in a fishing hut in Miami. There he witnesses a gangster making a corpse disappear. He kidnaps the involuntary witness in order to have him killed by his mafia colleagues. But Bremen manages to go underground in Disney World and to escape disguised as a Goofy. He gets on a bus and lands in Denver at night. Robbed by one of the wandering youth gangs and beaten to hospital maturity, he finds himself in a clinic in the city. Driven by his thoughts and to escape the strange thoughts, he flees that same night. He finds refuge with the homeless and spends seemingly endless times as an alcoholic bum under the bridges of Denver. In a fit of pent-up anger, he beats a rapist on a girl almost to death. Again he has to flee. Soul Dad puts it in a stolen 79 Pontiac. Coming from Utah, he ends up in the desert. Miz Morgan lies to Deputy Depp that Bremen is her long-awaited new farm worker and takes Bremen to her Two-M Ranch. Here, too, he spends an indefinite period of time until the events mutate into a completely unexpected horror trip. Miz, who tries to kill him in the most cruel way, as she has done with countless others before him, and then hanging him with the others in their freezer, becomes a victim herself. Having escaped the scene of this horror badly injured, Jeremy ends up on the penultimate stop of his journey to hell in Las Vegas. Along with his winnings of over $ 300,000, Jeremy is kidnapped by three gangsters in a Piper Chayenne to New Jersey. Bremen is to be disposed of there by Don Leoni people. Here we come full circle: Vanni Fucci, the crook, had recognized him on the control screen of one of the casinos. After studying the pilot's mind, Jeremy is able to provoke the gangsters on the plane into a shootout. He steers the machine into a crash landing. Again he is the survivor. The authorities now know about his identity because his fingerprints are inexplicably available. He is interrogated in the hospital. Again he is meticulously planning his next escape. But next to him lies the heavily damaged Robby. He remembers how good it felt when he met a group of critically ill children at Disneyland. Reading her mind behind the masquerade, he had given each child their own consolation. The desire comes over him to try the same with Robby. Penetrating his underdeveloped mind, he finds himself in a completely idealized world of his own. He and Gail are suddenly both in this place, which apparently corresponds to their perception. He and Gail's mind, according to Jeremy's theory of probability wave fronts , were when holograms rose in Robby's brain, along with all of the ideas and memories of their shared reality. Gail's soul was evidently able to save itself in his brain at the moment of death. In order to free himself from the boy's dying brain, Jeremy has to let go of Gail. He wakes up from a coma. He apparently spent five days with Gail. The doctors are speechless. He had been pronounced dead. When he is clear again, he implements his long-drawn-out plan and flees for the last time. This is where the narrative arc ends: Arriving back at the shore of the ocean, where he shared the last moments before Gail's death with her through spirit contact, Bremen shoots himself.
main characters
- Jeremy Bremen , mathematician in Philadelphia with a telepathic gift
- Gail , his wife, has the same intense mind-reading talent
- Soul Dad , a black bum who helps him escape
- Robby , deaf, blind, mentally retarded child
- Jacob Goldmann , Jewish researcher, lost his wife and son in the concentration camp
- Vanni Fucci , thief, crook, after Bremen on behalf of the mafioso Don Leoni
- Howard Collins , aka Deputy Depp, officer wants to arrest Bremen because of the stolen car
- Miz Fayette Morgan , farmer, Bremen's employer, who turns out to be a serial killer in the course of the plot
- Gernisavien , tortoiseshell cat by Gail and Jeremy
Publications
- Dan Simmons: The Empty Face , Heyne 1994, ISBN 3-453-08225-7