Moise and the world of reason

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Moise and the World of Reason is a novel by Tennessee Williams that first appeared in 1975.

The nameless first-person narrator , who calls himself a “brilliantly failed writer” several times, reports on his current situation and recounts retrospectives from his youth. The memories begin when he was fifteen when he first had an affair with a man, figure skater Lance, who later dies of an overdose. The youth described in the southern United States, with a drinking and flogging father, from whom the narrator flees to New York, has autobiographical traits.

In the narrative presence, the narrator is about thirty years old and lives with his friend Charles, an unsuccessful painter, in an abandoned warehouse in New York. The novel has no actual plot, rather the disparate lives of the characters are described in individual episodes, who oscillate between sexual passion, drug use and the attempt to work artistically. Moise is a sisterly friend of the narrator who, like all the other characters, leads a desperate bohemian life and plays less of a role in the story than the title suggests. She made her eponymous appearance right at the beginning of the novel when she made the following declaration at a specially improvised party: "The conditions in my world have become untenable. (...) My world is not your world at all. If I notice that each of us is the only inhabitant of his own world, so I am only saying something unbearably banal. (...) It really seems to me to be obvious that your world is, relatively speaking, a world that has a bit of reason contains. "

The novel tells less of a plot than it addresses the story itself. Individual narrative motifs often change associatively , as does the time levels. Again and again the narrator thinks about speaking and writing and often highlights their inadequacy by the fact that narrative sentences and sentences staged as spoken remain incomplete.

expenditure