holding area

"Thinking what about yourself?" the man asked. Said the detective, leaning forward, "Have you given any thought to the extreme danger of your position? What about the knife?" "About how wonderful I am," Natalie said.

and later it is said that this is her "final statement" as if given to the police. the whole chapter, she has been playing the game of guilt, the game of talking to this detective who is trying to find her out, and it is real to her, and it is pretend, it is an imaginary layer to an equally imaginary world.

the chapter seems to work backwards. before she is raped she thinks something wonderful will happen to her today, but at the very beginning of the chapter:

"Of course you remember," the detective said impatiently. "No one can live through such things and not remember them."

and it is natalie's crime, the crime the chapter works towards, the one she can't remember, because it hasn't happened yet. or it has already happened. she's already being shaped. her father wants her to write about him. at the beginning of the chapter, she submits to him a character sketch about him.

*best means whatever you want it to me, sometimes the best things are the ugliest, write that down

photos for reference:

hamlet

henry v

richard iii

crowned snake woman

in the alchemical "buch der heiligen dreifaltigkeit" ("book of the holy trinity"), bavaria, late 15th c.

The Tempest (1979)