Miriam And Pernath Sparknotes

Almost the entirety of the novel is the recording of the narrator’s dream, which begins with the thought of the hat that he took by mistake the day before and the strange recollection of a “stone that looked like a lump of fat” (Meyrink 10). The narrator’s name and identity are never mentioned, but it is interesting that once he enters the dream, after a brief state of awareness of the unconscious taking over the conscious, through the process of displacement, he assumes the identity of Athanasius Pernath, a gem cutter and engraver. The character “seems disjointed from his existence” (Barnett) as he experiences a series of strange occurrences which he cannot explain rationally. Those are the result of the primary revision in dreams, both displacement …show more content…
Here one can notice both processed of displacement and condensation working at the same time, for the image of the hermaphrodite also corresponds with that of the young girl Miriam, the unachievable object of desire for Athanasius Pernath. Miriam is the embodiment of purity and spirituality, unconsciously linked to the narrator’s mother – his desire to have Miriam therefore leads to the feeling of guilt and unworthiness, to the fear of unintentionally hurting the mother figure. The hermaphrodite appears wearing a crown, emphasizing the importance of the ultimate merge of contraries which is, Miriam explains: “not ... a final goal, [but] the beginning of a new course, which will be eternal, which will have no final end.” (Meyrink …show more content…
Freud claimed that “death is a biological drive, which he called the death drive, or thanatos” (Tyson 22). This wish is triggered by one’s fear of losing their life, which “makes living so painful and frightening that [their] only escape is death” (Tyson 23) This desire first manifests itself when the Athanasius meets the Juggler and he feels an eerie connection to it and the death feeling that it conveys – as if he was himself the one who created the Juggler, as if he was himself the Juggler. Throughout the dream, the feeling of anxiety intensifies and the “instinct to return to the inanimate state” (Freud 91) becomes stronger and stronger, as Athanasius elaborately plans his suicide: “So I would have to wait eight days, eight dreadful, dreary days, for death.” (Meyrink 130) The unescapable feeling of death finds him everywhere, taking various shapes, such as that of a headless man holding beans in his hand and urging Athanasius to make a choice. Incapable to comprehend the meaning of the beans, Athanasius does not take them in his possession, but refuses to leave them in the hand of the headless man as well. Rather, he decides to throw them on the ground, in this way rejecting life and death at the same time, unconsciously desiring a state between those too, in which he “could escape from the sense of this intangible, lurking presence!” (Meyrink