Nightwood

Deliver Us from the Labyrinth of Madness: Character Affect in Djuna Barnes 's Nightwood Language is a labyrinth we are born into lost. Only by leaving breadcrumbs, threading our subject, does one remember whence s/he came, where his/her subject ends and begins. Language may offer a solution to reduce problems into simplicity, but for such problems it conceals in language the people suffering within it. The alcoholic, the prostitute, the shameful, are made into monstrous forms by the epithets defining their subject: where language presumes they have no shame, immoral epithets drown those in pity for a subject "incapable" of change. These wild child 's, their decadence, is the resulting shame from their morality , as they have come to realise…