"Death Kit": Susan Sontag's Dream Narrative

Abstract

At about the same time that Susan Sontag was complaining that American fiction was on the decline because of its lack of formal ingenuity, she herself was writing Death Kit, one of the most interesting and successful experimental novels to appear in the 1960s.' Unlike many of the other radically experimental works which appeared in America about the same time-works like Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme's Snow White, or Robert Coover's Pricksongs and Descants-Death Kit does not employ the sort of highly self-conscious, blatantly artificial methods of structural innovation that force the reader to deal with the work primarily as an artifact. Indeed, if Death Kit belongs to any tradition at all, it is to that of the dream tale of Kafka or Borges, or the nightmarish works of Djuna Barnes, John Hawkes, and Anais Nin. As do Kafka and Nin, for example, Sontag creates in Death Kit a complete dream world, closely related to our own in some respects, but with its own peculiar landscape and logic. In addition, a variety of formal features in the book contributes to its sense of ambiguity: every time the word now appears in the text, for instance, it has parentheses around it; tense rules seem to be ignored and thus verbs switch from past to present with apparent indiscrimination; and, most puzzling of all, the point of view abruptly changes at certain times from a third-person narration (Diddy the Good was taking a business trip2) to an inclusive, first-person plural narration (We left the city heading