“Milkman” by Anna Burns (post 6): First-person narrator thought mad due to “memory lapses, mental separations, and splittings-off from consciousness”

“You’re a mad person.”

Once more this was me talking to myself” (1, p. 138).

“In my memory-lapse moments…” (1, p. 166).

“…she [her trusted friend] interrupted. ‘God. I can’t believe this. Your head! Your memory! All those mental separations and splittings-off from consciousness’…I’d experience illusions of never having been stopped previously by the state security forces when it was obvious I was stopped by them, she maintained, all the time…She ended this talk on surveillance and my disappearance into other dimensions…Given I was now a beyond-the-pale, reputed to read-while-walking as if sitting down; prone, according to the community, to back-to-front reading, starting on the last page and working back to the front page in order to pre-empt narrative surprises…[and she told me that I’d] pretend to give directions to invisible people — all while reading-while-walking…” (1, pp. 207-208).

1. Anna Burns. Milkman. Minneapolis Minnesota, Graywolf Press, 2018.