Dhalgren
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| Author | Samuel R. Delany |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Bantam Books |
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Publication date
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January 1975 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 879 pp (first edition, paperback) |
| ISBN | (first edition, paperback) |
| OCLC | 16303763 |
 Cover of Vintage edition. |
Dhalgren is a science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany. The story begins with a cryptic passage:
to wound the autumnal city.
So howled out for the world to give him a name.
The in-dark answered with wind.
What follows is an extended trip to and through Bellona, a fictional city in the American Midwest cut off from the rest of the world by some unknown catastrophe. William Gibson has referred to Dhalgren as "A riddle that was never meant to be solved."
The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephones do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot.
Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. 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.
The novel's protagonist is “the Kid”, (sometimes "Kidd"), a drifter who suffers from partial amnesia: he can't remember either his own name or those of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot, as do characters in two other Delany novels and one short story: Mouse in Nova (1968), Hogg in Hogg (1995), and Roger in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" (1967). Possibly he is intermittently schizophrenic: the novel’s narrative is intermittently incoherent (particularly at its end), the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of reality and the passages of time sometimes differ from those of other characters. Also he suffers from significant memory loss in the course of the story. In addition, he is dysmetric, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city. It is therefore unclear to what extent the events in the story are the product of an unreliable narrator.
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