Introduction

In this first of four readings in successive chapters, we will follow the viewpoint of the main protagonist, Dr Aaron Kaye. As in so many travel stories in and outside science fiction, the ship's doctor is the person through whose eyes the reader is informed about the adventures of the ship and its crew. The text of ‘A Momentary Taste of Being’ is divided into four parts, in which the events are chronologically told, as outlined in the synopsis in my introduction. Although Aaron is the focalizing agency throughout the story, only in the last part, in which he is logging the most recent events, is he the narrator as well. The first three parts are told by an external narrator, an impersonal agency. They are introduced by a dream of Aaron's, the meaning of which is not directly explained in the text and seems to escape Aaron's comprehension, at least up to the story's conclusion. Hence they form an invitation to the reader's interpretative capacities. Significantly, the last part, containing Aaron's monologic recording, does not begin with a dream: ‘I don't dream anymore’ is both Aaron's last sentence and that of the text. Its meaning is twofold. First it simply expresses Aaron's loss of hope and illusions for his own future and that of humankind. But it also explains that by now the subtext, encoded in the dreams, and the principal text match each other. Or, differently put, the events and processes in outer space and Aaron's subconscious somewhow mirror each other. The repressed gradually though ineluctably manifests itself, dream by dream. Eventually, Aaron has decoded his dreams, understanding that the repressed has returned with a vengeance.

In the following I will take the route of the subsequent dreams, understood as junction points between outer and inner space, between main text and subtext, so as to unravel the narrative dynamic and make suggestions about the interpretation of the text.