Analysis “Once you have given up the ghost, everything follows with dead certainty, even in the midst of chaos.” In the first sentence of Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller implies that he (or his first-person narrator, identified later as “Henry Miller”) is somehow separated from the world he inhabits. Much of the writing that follows adopts a detached perspective, regarding the mass of humanity with an inflection of superiority and, in these opening pages, a minimum of compassion. Miller feels disconnected; everything around him is “chaos”, and it has been this way since the beginning – “a fluid which enveloped me, which I breathed in through the gills.” Even in describing his prenatal life he refers to himself almost as an animal, an inhuman creature with “gills”; he is immediately able to see the opposite in everything and is his “own worst enemy.” Evidently, this is no ordinary child.
Posted on: Fri, 09 Aug 2013 03:17:01 +0000
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