Dhalgren - Plot Overview

Plot Overview

An event horizon, enveloping Bellona, prevents all radio and television signals, even phone messages, from entering or leaving the city. A rift may have been created in space-time. One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the darkness. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times the size it ordinarily appears rises to terrify the populace, then sets—and the same featureless cloud cover returns, with no hint that it was ever otherwise. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other. It is their reactions to (and dealings with) the strange happenings and isolation in the city that are the focus of the novel, rather than the happenings themselves.

The novel's protagonist is a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia: he can remember neither his own name nor the names of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot. (Characters in two other Delany novels and one short story dress the same way: Mouse in Nova, Hogg in Hogg, and Roger in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" ). Possibly he is intermittently schizophrenic. Not only does the novel end in schizoid babble (which recurs at various points in the text), but the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of the "changes in reality" sometimes differs from that of the other characters. Also he suffers from other significant memory loss in the course of the story. As well, he is dysmetric, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city.