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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
The narrator is trying to get rid of the body of someone named Jojo, but the body is too big to fit into a large plastic sack. Bernadette suggests getting a second sack for the head. But there are no suitable sacks, and they need to move Jojo from the basement soon.
This story begins in the middle of a dramatic moment, although it’s noteworthy that it doesn’t depict Jojo’s death, just the aftermath. Once again, death is a sinister presence that lingers over the story, not something the story addresses outright.
Themes
Eventually, the narrator and Bernadette decide to take Jojo with them in their car as if he’s still alive. When two cops on bicycles come by, the narrator and Bernadette pretend that Jojo is very drunk. The dead Jojo convincingly plays along, unlike the live Jojo, who would have been finicky. The narrator and Bernadette are the ones who murdered Jojo.
Several characters in the novel seem to be on linear tracks determined by destiny. Jojo is a darkly humorous extreme example of this, since he is dead and his body has no choice but to go wherever the narrator and Bernadette drag him.
Themes
The narrator has been looking for a new life lately because he feels that his past weighs him down too much. An important step in that process will be finding a place to burn Jojo. But with everything on his mind, the narrator forgot to refill the car’s tank, and it runs out of gas. The narrator and Bernadette refill the tank, using the gas they’d planned on using to burn Jojo.
Jojo’s heavy body is a physical representation of the mental burden of the narrator’s past and the bad things he has done. In this passage, the narrator faces the choice between being able to get rid of his past (by burning Jojo’s body) or being able to continue moving forward (by using the gas to fill up the car instead). Like many characters in the novel, the narrator has no choice but to move forward.
Themes
The narrator thinks back to how he got in this situation in the first place. He and Bernadette coordinated as soon as they heard Jojo was in Paris, and they managed to carry out the murder without Jojo even learning the narrator’s identity. The narrator tells more stories about his past, going back further, saying that he wants you to feel like you are as saturated with his past as he is. The narrator has had many names on his passports, but most people know him by the name Ruedi the Swiss.
The narrator’s comments about getting bogged down with the past mirror the comments of the narrator in the first story, who noted that names and other personal details unavoidably get attached to the narrator’s “I” as a story goes on. And so just as the narrator is bogged down with guilty memories from his past, the audience also begins to attach more details to the narrator, like the name Ruedi the Swiss.
Themes
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Bernadette herself never had any role in the narrator’s pasts and knew nothing about his history with Jojo before the murder, including how the narrator believes Jojo used to cheat him out of money. Now, in the present, Bernadette gets out of the passenger seat of the car and climbs over the gearshift to start grinding on the narrator’s lap, saying that when the narrator burst into the room to kill Jojo, he interrupted Bernadette in the middle of an orgasm. As she finishes, Jojo’s body falls on top of them from the back seat.
Bernadette in some ways resembles a reader, encountering the narrator near the beginning of this story and only slowly learning about his story—and only the parts that the narrator chooses to reveal. This passage humorously illustrates how sex can be a distraction from death, with Jojo’s body in the back seat standing in for the death that seems to be chasing the narrator and Bernadette if they get caught.
Themes
The narrator tries to explain to Bernadette that he killed Jojo for reasons from the past totally unrelated to her. The two of them get out of the car and take Jojo into an elevator. They want to drop his body off the roof to make it look like a suicide or perhaps as if Jojo made a mistake while attempting to commit a robbery. They complete the deed, leaving Jojo as a small, distant stain in the courtyard, then decide that they still need to dispose of their plastic sack, which could be evidence.
The narrator tries to compensate for his own guilt by transferring it to Jojo, making it look as if Jojo is responsible for his own death and that perhaps he even died in the middle of committing a crime. Even after disposing of Jojo, however, he remains a stain the narrator can see in the distance, suggesting that the narrator himself has been “stained” by his past and can’t escape it.
Themes
As Bernadette and the narrator get off the elevator on the ground floor, three men stop them and ask to see what’s inside the plastic sack. The narrator thinks the men look like relatives of Bernadette’s. The narrator shows them the sack, believing it will be empty, but inside, they find a leather shoe that looks like the narrator’s.
Several of the stories in this novel end with the narrator being betrayed, often by a woman he thought he could trust. This story leaves it ambiguous about whether Bernadette betrayed the narrator or if he’s just paranoid, perhaps reflecting the narrator’s audience’s own anxieties that Ludmilla isn’t the person he expects her to be.
Themes
