Held

Content Warning: This section of the guide contains brief mentions of suicide and antisemitism.

“The past exists as a present moment.”

Lying wounded on a battlefield, John consoles himself with a number of abstract thoughts about the nature of existence and human experience, distracting himself from his current plight. As he contemplates a range of aphorisms, the contemplative, abstract tone also introduces the novel’s voice, which punctuates the narrative with philosophical statements that often remain unassigned to any particular character. Additionally, this aphorism about the past becomes an apt description of the novel as a whole, capturing the author’s habit of shifting the timeframe back and forth and weaving “present” events with reverberations of the past and intimations of the future.

“But pleasure was also countless, beyond itself—because it remained, even only in memory; and in your body, even when forgotten.”

Savoring his sensual memories of his wife Helena, John reflects that although these experiences are finite, the pleasure that they give him cannot be quantified, as this pleasure will live on in his body as a sense memory long after the details are forgotten. This moment of contemplation serves the novel’s broader argument that clearly defined boundaries between events, emotions, and even life and death are largely illusory, and that an experience’s true essence endures long beyond its arbitrary details.