The Narrator's Workplace Naps
The narrator recounts, “At work, I took hour-long naps in the supply closet under the stairs during my lunch breaks. 'Napping' is such as childish word, but that was what I was doing. The tonality of my night sleep was more variable and generally unpredictable, but every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, and infinite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions.” The peaceful closet offers the narrator a safe place to nap. Moshfegh uses vivid language to evoke the tangible qualities of this naptime sleep, in contrast to the narrator's nighttime sleep.
The Imagery of Sleep
The narrator explicates, “Oh, sleep, nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from miseries of my waking consciousness. I was not a narcoleptic- I never fell asleep when I didn’t want to. I was more of a insomniac. A somnophile. I’d always loved sleeping. It was one thing my mother and I had enjoyed doing together when I was a child.” The narrator’s love for sleep commences during her childhood years. Moshfegh uses strong emotional language to tie sleep to feelings of comfort and connection in the narrator's childhood.
Terrible Art
Moshfegh vividly describes the terrible art that the narrator encounters at her gallery job.
"Ping Xi’s work first appeared at Ducat as part of a group show called “Body of Substance,” and it consisted of splatter paintings, à la Jackson Pollock, made from his own ejaculate. He claimed that he’d stuck a tiny pellet of powdered colored pigment into the tip of his penis and masturbated onto huge canvases. He titled the abstract paintings as though each had some deep, dark political meaning. Blood-Dimmed Tide, and Wintertime in Ho Chi Minh City and Sunset over Sniper Alley. Decapitated Palestinian Child. Bombs Away, Nairobi. It was all nonsense, but people loved it.”
Moshfegh goes into great detail on the pieces in the gallery and how much each one costs.
Dreams
Moshfegh describes many of the narrator's dreams. The dream are one of the few places where we get a warmer description of the narrator's emotional reality.
“And then there were the dreams about my parents, which I never mentioned to Dr. Tuttle. I dreamt my dad had an illegitimate son he kept in the closet of his study. I discovered the boy, pale and undernourished, and together we conspired to burn down the house. I dreamt that I lathered up my mother’s pubic hair with a bar of Ivory soap in the shower, then pulled tangle of hair out of her vagina. It was like the kind of fur ball a cat coughs up, or a clog in a bathtub drain. In the dream, I understood that the tangle of hair was my father’s cancer.”
Though the narrator fabricates dramatic dreams to report to her psychiatrist, it is the real dreams that reveal the narrator's interiority.
