silverseason
New Member
I'm halfway through now, coming up on chapter 49, and would like to check in again. In a long, multi-layer novel like this, it is so easy to be struck by something while reading but then get distracted by later parts. Anyway, what I want to say is that I admire Solzenitsyn's technique in handling all the many people and subplots.
In the chapter I have just finished, The Ark, we have a vision of the zeks in their closed world, especially on Sunday evening. "During this period, the prisoners were locked from outside by heavy iron doors, which no one opened, and no one entered, no one summoned them, or picked on them. During these short hours the outer world would not penetrate inside to disturb anyone." These are prisoners, not free to leave for that outside world, and yet this locked-in Sunday evening feels peaceful, secure! You understand this when you reflect on where we have just been in the narrative: the students living with uncertainty about their futures; the persecuted wives of the prisoners during the visit; the well-brought-up girl Clara who is slowly beginning to understand the system; the bureaucrats agreeing to impossible deadlines to placate the higher-ups. All live in fear, prisoners of a system which could grind up any of them for an infraction or for no reason at all.
If the novel were set only within the Sarashka, it would feel impossibly closed in. So we go outside to offices and student dormitories and the theater. The fear and uncertainty are so great everywhere that there is not security in any of these places. The Zeks, locked in on Sunday evening, are secure: they have certainty.
In the chapter I have just finished, The Ark, we have a vision of the zeks in their closed world, especially on Sunday evening. "During this period, the prisoners were locked from outside by heavy iron doors, which no one opened, and no one entered, no one summoned them, or picked on them. During these short hours the outer world would not penetrate inside to disturb anyone." These are prisoners, not free to leave for that outside world, and yet this locked-in Sunday evening feels peaceful, secure! You understand this when you reflect on where we have just been in the narrative: the students living with uncertainty about their futures; the persecuted wives of the prisoners during the visit; the well-brought-up girl Clara who is slowly beginning to understand the system; the bureaucrats agreeing to impossible deadlines to placate the higher-ups. All live in fear, prisoners of a system which could grind up any of them for an infraction or for no reason at all.
If the novel were set only within the Sarashka, it would feel impossibly closed in. So we go outside to offices and student dormitories and the theater. The fear and uncertainty are so great everywhere that there is not security in any of these places. The Zeks, locked in on Sunday evening, are secure: they have certainty.