LUCID DARKNESS
Subjectivity, Desire, and Guilt in Antonis Nikolis’s The Death of the Mercenary
1. Introduction
Antonis Nikolis’s The Death of the Mercenary is a novel of radical interiorization, in which desire, guilt, trauma, and corporeality are organized into a narrative of remarkable aesthetic density and acute existential charge. Its narrative movement follows the fluid and disordered experience of the protagonist’s consciousness, persistently unsettling the boundaries between reality, memory, fantasy, and vision. The work thus exceeds the limits of a dramatic story of erotic obsession or guilt and emerges, instead, as a complex literary elaboration of the subject’s relation to desire, the Other, the body, mourning, and death.
The aim of the present essay is to examine the novel both as a narrative and dramaturgical construction and as a work of philosophical and interpretive depth. Within this framework, the discussion addresses the plot and its internal dynamic, the narrative and stylistic architecture of the work, the organic relation between form and meaning, and the theoretical horizon that makes possible a substantive reading of it. From this perspective, The Death of the Mercenary appears as a novel in which literary form gives inward shape to the experience of trauma, transforming desire, guilt, and memory into the constitutive centers of a consciousness struggling to preserve its unity.
Before turning to the interpretive and theoretical investigation of the work, however, a concise presentation of its plot is necessary, since the internal articulation of its episodes is directly bound up with its existential and formal economy.
2. Plot
The novel traces the course of Elias Petres from an introverted, repetitive, and emotionally inert life toward a gradual and painful disintegration culminating in suicide. At the outset, the protagonist appears trapped within a monotonous everyday existence, defined by his teaching routine, the care of his elderly parents, and a rather enervated relationship with Merope. The appearance, however, of Yuri, a young soldier and student at an evening school, radically disturbs this static condition, awakening within him an unspoken desire and a deeper existential unrest. Through the occasion of private lessons in Ancient Greek, the relationship between the two gradually acquires emotional and erotic intensity, until the failure of communication, mounting awkwardness, and Elias’s obsessive attachment precipitate a critical destabilization, which reaches its climax in their nocturnal meeting on the beach and then in his home, where bodily proximity and psychic instability issue in Yuri’s sudden death.
From that point onward, the narrative enters the domain of guilt, panic, and moral collapse. Elias attempts to erase every trace of the young man, travels to Rhodes in order to misdirect any possible investigation, proceeds to the secret burial of the body and, later, to its exhumation so that it may be returned to Yuri’s family, though this act grants him no redemption. Thereafter, haunted by Yuri’s memory and by the experience of the exhumation, he attempts a fragile reconnection with life through corporeality, eroticism, and a more candid acceptance of his desire, until the sudden death of his mother entwines familial mourning with his personal burden of guilt and deepens his devastation. In the penultimate chapter, he gradually detaches himself from the world of the living and sinks into a liminal state in which memory, desire, and death become inextricably intertwined, until he is led consciously to self-destruction. The seventh chapter, shifting the focus to Merope, follows the consequences of his death for those close to him, the discovery of the body, the funeral, and the collective experience of mourning, before concluding with an image of continuity through Merope’s pregnancy and the birth of Elias’s children.
This trajectory, from the stasis of everyday life to suicide, maps the gradual rupture of the protagonist’s subjective coherence under the pressure of desire, guilt, and mourning. For this reason, the plot of the work is inseparably bound to the distinctive narrative and dramaturgical mode of its construction.
3. Narrative Design and Dramaturgical Structure
The Death of the Mercenary is organized as a spiral, progressively interiorized narrative in which trauma returns cyclically and the climactic movement culminates in existential paralysis and, ultimately, in metaphysical exit. Although the seven chapters unfold in chronological sequence, the narrative preserves a strong internal fluidity, as flashbacks, associative images, digressions, and fusions of present, past, and fantasy are assimilated into its very texture and convey the protagonist’s psychic depth. The plot disperses itself into micro-scenes of everyday life, through which Elias’s inner transformation is rendered, from a restrained and reflective middle-aged man into an obsessively fixated observer of the enigmatic Other. The conflict of the work accordingly assumes a predominantly internal and existential character, while time ceases to function as a neutral narrative framework and becomes instead a medium of fixation, recurrence, and traumatic knots.
This narrative economy is directly bound to the role of the narrator. Although the narration is cast in the third person, the focalization remains, throughout almost the entire work, so closely attached to Elias that the narrator’s voice often merges with his consciousness. The external narrator systematically withdraws, leaving space for interior monologue and free indirect discourse, with the result that the protagonist’s moral, aesthetic, and cultural gaze decisively colors the narration. At moments of intense psychic pressure, this focalization acquires a character of doubleness, as Elias experiences himself simultaneously from within and as an object of observation. This “double gaze” renders with precision the fracture of his consciousness and its difficulty in coinciding with itself. Only in the final chapter does this focalization shift decisively, as the narrative opens itself to the perspective of the survivors, and especially to that of Merope, thereby allowing individual trauma to be transformed into shared memory and into a ritual of mourning.
Within this arrangement, gaze and silence constitute two of the central dramaturgical motifs of the work. Elias observes Yuri and his substitutes with persistence, yet the gaze produces neither knowledge nor intimacy; observation reproduces distance and intensifies the experience of lack. Correspondingly, silence and the failure of language as a vehicle of communication function as a complementary axis of the same dramaturgy, since dialogue often collapses into awkwardness, misrecognition, or violence. Gaze and silence thus become fundamental mechanisms of the narrative, through which the subject’s difficulty in approaching the Other and in articulating a coherent relation to itself is disclosed.
The scenic and stylistic organization of the novel is fully attuned to this inner dramaturgy. Nikolis’s writing is marked by long, musically structured sentences, parenthetical expansions, syntactic fluidity, subterranean irony, and an intense sensory attentiveness to detail, especially to the body, light, touch, and silence. The scenic arrangement develops more musically than theatrically, through rhythmic alternations of introversion, momentary mobilization, imaginary intensification, and renewed descent, while transitions from external action to recollection, lapse, or hallucination occur almost imperceptibly. A decisive role in this formal economy is played by the recurring motifs of time, guilt, the body, ritual, the gaze, and interruption, which together constitute a closed, oscillatory universe in which trauma is ceaselessly recycled.
The relation between form and meaning in The Death of the Mercenary is organic. Language functions as the very site in which experience takes place. The fluidity of syntax, the diffusion of the sentence, the avoidance of linear climax, and the oscillatory unfolding of discourse give formal expression to the protagonist’s inner impasse, the fragmentation of his consciousness, and the difficulty of unifying experience into stable meaning. Narrative form thus becomes the primary bearer of significance, insofar as it renders perceptible Elias’s inability to articulate a redemptive narrative. From this conjunction the writing derives its particular tension of mourning, desire, and existential upheaval.
4. Philosophical Framework
For an in-depth reading of this novel, philosophical framing proves especially fruitful, since it provides a theoretical horizon capable of illuminating crucial aspects of its intrinsic problematic. References to Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Blanchot, and Ricœur acquire significance as interpretive tools that shed light on fundamental axes of the work: the subject’s relation to death, the inner instability of desire, the encounter with the Other, the unsayable character of trauma, and the difficulty of narratively unifying experience.
Heidegger: being-toward-death (Sein-zum-Tode) and the disintegration of temporality
Heidegger offers an initial and indispensable interpretive schema, since Elias’s trajectory may be read in relation to being-toward-death. His temporality is organized as a progressive absorption into loss, guilt, and disconnection from the world, a fact that confers upon the novel a pronounced existential gravity.
Sartre: bad faith (mauvaise foi) and the self-displacement of desire
Sartre illuminates the dimension of desire and the forms of self-deception that accompany it. Elias finds it difficult to recognize and consciously integrate his longing into his self-understanding; as a result, desire is displaced, distorted, and ultimately linked to a deeper instability of the self. His guilt thereby acquires a scope that encompasses both action and the fluidity of a consciousness that struggles to inhabit with clarity that which it desires.
Levinas: the face, alterity, and infinite responsibility
Levinas renders more visible the weight of the relation to the Other. Yuri functions both as an object of desire and as a figure of alterity that preserves its asymmetry and irreducibility, activating in Elias desire, responsibility, exposure, and guilt. His significance is thus tied to the ethical and psychic destabilization brought about by the very presence of the Other.
Blanchot: the unsayable of trauma and the withdrawal of meaning
Blanchot offers an especially apt framework for understanding the unsayable element of trauma. Yuri’s death brings Elias before a point at which language struggles to grasp the event and circles around it from the edge of silence. Trauma remains a zone of incapacity, where narration touches its limits and silence acquires ontological and aesthetic weight.
Ricœur: memory, narrative, and identity as an unfinished process
Particularly central is Ricœur’s contribution. The problematic of narrative identity, the configuration of experience into plot, and Elias’s difficulty in constituting a coherent life story provide one of the strongest theoretical supports for the overall interpretation. The Death of the Mercenary may indeed be read as a narrative of the failure of narration, as a work in which life resists complete unification and trauma persists as a center of asymmetry.
Within this perspective, philosophical framing serves to bring the work’s internal composition more clearly into view. The Death of the Mercenary thus emerges as a novel in which literary form is organically intertwined with existential inquiry, making desire, guilt, memory, and death structural axes of the subject’s very experience.
5. An Interpretive Approach to the Novel
A comprehensive interpretive approach to The Death of the Mercenary leads to an understanding of the work as a novel in which desire, guilt, trauma, and memory are organized into a unified formal and existential composition. The work constitutes a narrative of mourning and inner disintegration, in which experience struggles to acquire stable narrative coherence and the protagonist’s consciousness proves unable fully to process what passes through it. Literary form elaborates desire as a traumatic experience, guilt as a force of inner decomposition, and memory as the space in which the bond endures beyond loss. The distinctiveness of the novel lies in the precision with which it gives form to an existence that struggles to reconcile the body with consciousness, desire with language, and loss with narration.
6. Focused Interpretive Perspectives
The preceding observations may be deepened through three more specific interpretive focal points, each of which illuminates a crucial condensation within the work: the ending of the sixth chapter as a ritual of silence and ultimate union with the lost object of desire; Merope’s vision as a form of symbolic mourning-work; and homoerotic desire together with queer corporeality as an embodied field of self-understanding, exposure, and fragile survival.
A. The ritual of silence: the ending of Chapter VI
“He releases the handbrake, presses the accelerator with all his strength.
He closes his eyelids, feels the capillaries, the nerve fibers above the cornea. ‘…That a place of rest has been prepared for you.’”
The ending of the sixth chapter constitutes one of the densest and most charged moments of the novel, since here the narrative shifts decisively from psychic disintegration to a form of lyrically ordered exit. Elias’s final movement appears as a liminal and ritual act through which death assumes the form of a silent reunion with Yuri. Silence here functions as the only possible mode of expression at the point where language has exhausted its capacities. The protagonist’s end thus acquires the character of an ultimate solution, because it transfers desire and loss into a space where they no longer seek verbal justification and are lived as an indivisible experience. For this reason, the ending of Chapter VI constitutes the metaphysical and aesthetic center of gravity of the novel.
B. A psychoanalytic reading of Merope’s vision
Merope’s vision in the seventh chapter lends itself to a psychoanalytic reading because it condenses with exceptional density the relation between mourning, memory, desire, and the recomposition of the psychic world after loss. The image of the two mounted figures functions as a symbolic configuration of a traumatic event through which loss becomes psychically bearable. In this way, the vision performs the work of mourning, insofar as it gives form to death, inscribes it within a symbolic pattern, and permits a passage from raw devastation to the possibility of continuity. Its significance is intensified in relation to Merope’s pregnancy and the birth of the children, since memory is then transformed from traumatic return into genealogical duration. Merope’s vision thus constitutes one of the subtlest mechanisms in the work for the transition from trauma to memory and from memory to the possibility of psychic and vital continuity.
C. Homoerotic desire and queer corporeality
In The Death of the Mercenary, homoerotic desire appears as an underlying condition of existence, often unclear even to the protagonist himself. Desire functions as an embodied form of contact with life for a person worn down by guilt, loneliness, and incessant self-observation. Within this framework, queer experience emerges as a field in which corporeality, pleasure, anonymity, and precarity coexist. Dating applications, silences, secret names, nudist beaches, and fleeting encounters constitute an economy of desire that moves underground, binding intimacy to fear and proximity to the difficulty of stable public naming. Queer corporeality thus appears as the last space in which life remains tangible, even when the coherence of the self has already been ruptured. Desire accordingly retains an ambiguous character until the end, combining exposure, trauma, relief, and the persistence of life within the experience of dissolution.
Taken together, these focused readings confirm that The Death of the Mercenary is organized as a multilayered literary field in which desire, mourning, silence, the body, and memory are interwoven into a form of experience that exceeds the limits of straightforward psychography. From this dense articulation the work derives its power, transforming the extreme moments of existence into forms of aesthetic and interpretive intensity.
7. Literary Comparisons and Affiliations
The Death of the Mercenary belongs to a literary field in which interiority, desire, guilt, and the experience of loss acquire a central formative function, without being exhausted by any of its possible affiliations. The aesthetic identity of the work is connected to the way in which it enters into dialogue with recognizable traditions of modern prose fiction and recomposes them through a style that is intensely personal, sensorily dense, and formally committed to the disorganization of consciousness. Literary analogies thereby acquire interpretive value, since they bring into sharper relief the distinctiveness of Nikolis’s own achievement.
A first area of affinity concerns prose fiction of interiority and guilt, in which the protagonist’s gaze turns incessantly toward the self and the narrative is organized around the ongoing erosion of subjective coherence. From this perspective, the novel may be associated above all with Thomas Bernhard, in whose work consciousness circles obsessively around traumatic nuclei and language becomes the vehicle of unremitting inner pressure. Nikolis, however, converts this interiority into formal rhythm, making syntax itself and scenic arrangement the bearers of the protagonist’s crisis.
A second affinity may be located in works where memory, consciousness, and inner duration prevail over external action, disorganizing linear narration and shifting the weight onto the subjective experience of time. Here The Death of the Mercenary may be placed in dialogue with William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, since in both works narrative form is closely bound to nonlinear temporality and the priority of inner experience. In Nikolis, however, this temporal fluidity is linked even more closely to the recycling of trauma, desire, and guilt, thereby acquiring a sharper existential and psychic charge.
Related, though more specific, is the affinity with Claude Simon and The Flanders Road (La Route des Flandres), insofar as here too the narrative is permeated by sensory and mnemonic density, while experience is diffused into fragments of impression, recollection, and inner oscillation. In The Death of the Mercenary, the body is not merely an object of erotic apprehension but a bearer of trauma, memory, and the failure of verbal elaboration. The sensory attentiveness to detail, the insistence on gaze, touch, and silence, as well as the diffusion of experience into impressions and recollections, bring the work close to a mode of writing that gives form to experience through memory and perception. Here too Nikolis’s personal style is bound to a rare balance between subdued notation and subterranean tragic intensity.
A third area of dialogue concerns the poetics of alterity and the failure of communication, together with the sense that the subject is sinking into a world of inner erosion and incapacity for stable meaning. The comparison with László Krasznahorkai proves especially fruitful here, since in both literary universes the disintegration of time, the slow inward descent, and the long-breathed linguistic intensity are linked to an experience of existential corrosion. Yuri, moreover, remains throughout the work an unclassifiable and partially inaccessible figure, one whom Elias never succeeds in fully knowing or approaching. Their relationship remains charged with asymmetry, projection, misunderstanding, and silence. Thus, in Nikolis as well, the Other retains the character of an enigma and at the same time becomes the driving force of the narrative.
These literary affinities bring out the distinctiveness of The Death of the Mercenary. The novel draws on recognizable traditions of modern prose fiction and arrives at a rigorously personal form in which interiority, desire, guilt, and mourning function as conditions of the formal and existential organization of discourse itself.
8. Conclusion
Through its complex narrative, dramaturgical, and philosophical constitution, The Death of the Mercenary emerges as one of the most distinctive and inwardly coherent works of contemporary Greek prose fiction. Its significance extends beyond the representation of an individual tragedy and beyond the thematic field of erotic obsession, guilt, or self-destruction. Its essential distinctiveness lies in the way it transforms the lived experiences of desire, loss, mourning, and inner dissolution into questions of form, time, language, and narrative economy.
Elias’s trajectory acquires psychological, ethical, and existential depth, since it constitutes a space in which the limits of subjective coherence, of the relation to the Other, and of language’s power to hold experience are tested. The narrative persists in fracture, diffusion, and the difficulty of unification, turning this experience into its aesthetic and interpretive center. The novel thereby extends beyond the limits of a dramatic plot and develops into a meditation on desire as a force of destabilization, on guilt as a condition of existence, and on memory as a painful yet necessary form of continuity.
Within this perspective, The Death of the Mercenary demonstrates that contemporary Greek prose fiction continues to produce works of high formal self-consciousness and existential depth, capable of entering into an equal dialogue with philosophical thought and with major traditions of European literature. Nikolis’s personal expressive register is bound to his ability to compose, with subdued intensity and sensory precision, a world in which the body, desire, guilt, silence, and death assume a decisive role in the formal and existential organization of discourse. In sum, the novel remains an exceptionally dense literary study of the human encounter with the Other, with the self, and with the unbearable weight of loss.
EXCURSUS
On the Threshold of the Uncanny (Freud’s das Unheimliche):
Dreams, Hallucinatory Sequences, and the Fragmentation of the Self in Elias
1. The Pre-Dream Fissure (Chapter II)
In Chapter II, the narrative intensifies its focus on Elias’s inner world and prepares the transition to dream experience through a scene of decisive self-estrangement:
“He saw himself in a mute, empty, and arid landscape, as if in some barren tract somewhere in North Africa, waiting for one of those ramshackle buses, painted and repainted with oil paint, standing, alone, with the imprints of the soft afternoon rays on the back of his neck and his cheek. He was approaching his very image, his profile, as a light breeze might approach the ear and the sparse short hair at the temple and sideburn.”
The phrase “He saw himself” establishes from the outset a structure of inner division. Elias appears simultaneously as the one who sees and as the visible figure, as consciousness and as image. Identity is already presented as an image detached from its inner coherence. The “mute, empty, and arid” landscape functions as an external inscription of psychic desolation. Silence, immobility, and the protagonist’s solitary stance compose a space of stripping-away, in which the relation to the world remains without response and without stable supports.
Particular significance attaches to the waiting for a means of transport already marked by decay. The “ramshackle buses,” “painted and repainted,” suggest a movement weakened, almost immobilized within repetition. At the same time, the image possesses a strong corporeality. The “soft rays” leave “imprints” on the body, while the movement toward the profile of the self is rendered as an almost tactile experience. Sight approaches touch, and the sensory order loses the clarity of its distinctions. Here the boundary of the dream begins to take shape: self-perception no longer preserves a stable contour.
The scene functions as a threshold. Before the dream sequence proper, the narrative has already inscribed Elias within an experience of inner fragmentation, in which the self encounters itself as a foreign image.
2. The First Dream: Bodily Pressure, the Rupture of Familiarity, and the Deformation of Form
The pre-dream fissure is immediately followed by the first dream, in which inner instability assumes a nightmarish form:
“In his sleep he woke to urinate at the very moment he was emerging from a strange dream, that he was, so to speak, chewing gum and hard little pieces were crunching together with the elastic mass, fragments which he thought might be shards of his own teeth, he was moving down a narrow corridor, which he took to be part of his house, with plastics and rags and cardboard along the edges of the walls and on the floors, he walked on and wondered who on earth had broken in, whether the burglar was still inside the house, the corridor was long, at its end a wooden door mottled with damp, he pushed it, he could not fit into the lavatory, he bent down to see his broken teeth in a round mirror low on the wall, a little above the skirting board, then abruptly he was in the bedroom (which resembled that of a cousin in childhood), dust and mothballs, folded and bundled blankets and bedclothes on the bed, the wares of a gypsy woman, who standing opposite him was handing them over to one child inside the room and another outside the low window, while at the same time she was complaining to Elias about something, demanding something soundlessly, and he was gesturing to her to leave, to jump, to get out through the window, then he noticed that her right hand, as she lifted it, did not grow from her shoulder, that it grew from her back.”
The dream opens with an elementary organic need, the need to urinate, and from this point of departure organizes a sequence of failed discharge. Bodily pressure is immediately displaced into the oral sphere. The gum is mixed with hard fragments, possibly pieces of his own teeth. The act of chewing, which ordinarily belongs to the work of processing, is transformed into an experience of inner disintegration. The body appears to wound itself from within.
This disturbance then extends to the space of dwelling. The narrow corridor is recognized as part of his house, yet its materiality bears the traces of makeshift repair: “plastics and rags and cardboard.” Familiarity has already undergone damage. The space appears precarious, maintained by rudimentary means and always on the verge of giving way. Inscribed within this alteration is also the thought of burglary. The house has been violated, and the intruder may still remain inside. The foreign element has installed itself within the very interior space.
The failure to gain access to the lavatory constitutes the center of gravity of the scene. Elias arrives before the door, yet “he could not fit into” it. The urgent need for expulsion remains suspended. At the immediately following stage, the gaze is directed toward the mirror and encounters the injured self-image. The broken teeth confirm that the fissure previously felt in the body has now been inscribed in the image as well. The low-placed mirror adds to the scene a tone of abasement: self-perception stoops toward a degraded and damaged form.
The abrupt displacement to the bedroom that resembles a cousin’s childhood room introduces a regressive element. The dust, the mothballs, the folded blankets and bedclothes render a space of frozen memory, in which the past survives as stored residue. Within it appears the figure of the gypsy woman, bearer of an intrusive and indeterminate alterity. She moves objects of covering and protection, channels them inward and outward, while simultaneously articulating a mute demand. The tension of the scene arises precisely from this soundless complaint: the claim exists, but speech is absent.
Elias’s reaction takes the form of a gesture of expulsion. What had previously appeared as impossible bodily discharge now returns as a violent demand for the removal of the Other. The final deformation of the body, the hand that “grew from her back,” completes the dream’s escalation. Anatomy loses its natural order, and form yields to an image of uncanny alteration.
The first dream renders with striking density an experience of generalized psychic disorganization. Organic pressure remains unresolved, familiar space bears the marks of violation, memory returns in immobilized form, and the body ends in deformation. Elias is presented as a subject unable to inhabit with coherence his body, his space, and his self-image.
3. After Yuri’s Death: Traumatic Awakening, Fragmentation of Consciousness, and the Disorganization of Memory
At the beginning of Chapter III, the psychic collapse of Elias immediately following Yuri’s death is recorded with particular vividness. The narrative renders the event not as a simple temporal sequence but as an experience of shock that ruptures the coherence of consciousness and alters the protagonist’s relation to the body, memory, and reality. Elias’s awakening is an awakening within trauma: the awareness of death does not establish itself gradually, but breaks in violently, in a stream of panic, bodily dysregulation, and associative collapse.
“[…] He felt pain in the joint and at the edge beneath the jaw, there he had probably been grazed and bled, until—in a matter of seconds—recovering consciousness and instantly flooded with anxiety, he leapt upright and rushed back into the house. The mercenary lay there on his back exactly as he had left him, one hand hanging outside the sofa, the eyes and mouth half closed. He cried ‘Yuri’ and again and again, in utter despair, then lowering his voice, with savage and deep desperation, ‘My God, Christ, what happened, my God,’ […] How could he undo all this, what happened, why did it happen, he threw himself into a corner of the sitting room and let out cries and hoarse sobs together, then stiffened. Yuri was dead or dying. Yuri, dead? What excuse could he make? How could he account for the marks, the redness on the neck, the quarrel, but even by negligence, this thing is homicide. […] He began again with sobbing and desperate contortions of the body as if he were bound hand and foot with ropes. He approached the boy’s body once more. No, he was dead. He murmured: ‘He breathed his last… Yuri.’ He took him in his arms and began a wailing cry, which, however, did not last for long […]. Disconnected strange images ran through his mind, at the end a white lily, a calla, the yellow stamen with the white pollen, then the hands of old Argyro, his father’s mother, on the kitchen counter, holding and singeing pigeons over the blue flame on burning cotton soaked in alcohol. […] Then his father strangling chickens in the henhouse and shouting to him, ‘Come and kill one too, what sort of man will you become when you grow up?’ the twisting of the larynx, the snapping, the warm shudder from the birds’ feathers and blood, the sour avian smell from the droppings, they are stepping in mud made of fresh manure, both of them wearing rubber boots. […] And again winter, January, alone once more, in a field beyond Psalidi, bent over, walking, gathering wild narcissi, water flowers, then the drops the blood, his nose bleeding, dripping first into his palm, then onto the white bouquet. A teacher’s hand drags him by the ear to the headmaster, in the schoolyard, he runs trying to keep pace with the adult’s nervous stride behind the hand lest it tear off his ear, he remembers neither whose hand it was nor why. […] the boys in the changing rooms for gymnastics, the classmate with the early body hair, the already formed body, glancing sideways at him while he adjusts and settles his penis in his briefs. The intimacy between them as when he smells the smegma on the tip of his finger after rubbing it under the armpit or at the pubis. […] he looks upward from below with his arm stretched high, an adult palm grips his wrist tightly, he anxiously searches for his mother, whimpers and calls for her, ‘mama, mama!’ Then, afternoon, late autumn, […] he turns to look at his palms, yellow and rotten wet leaves and mud, his trousers muddy too at the knees and shins as he crawls, the tips of his shoes soaked. Caterpillars, worms, and small snails. After that he must have remained sunk still deeper, though without sensing where.”
This passage shows that the experience of death does not remain at the level of immediate recognition, but sweeps Elias into a delirious sequence of memory, sensation, and archaic associations. The flow does not follow causal logic; it is organized associatively, through images of flowers, dead animals, blood, childhood humiliation, sexual embarrassment, and primal fear. Yuri’s death thus activates a deeper layer of experience, where violence, guilt, masculine ordeal, and the exposure of the body have already been inscribed. The narrative therefore records not only panic before the event, but also the sudden return of an entire traumatic biography.
After the first shock, Elias’s consciousness is explicitly presented as divided. The subject appears split between a mechanism of cold practical management and a second, disconnected stream in which actions lose their weight and are transformed almost into immaterial fabrications.
“[…] Then, after he had recovered a little, he felt himself being split in two, as though he forked into two different currents, in one he mechanically carried out whatever cold reason dictated to him, in the other he almost erased his actions or turned them into thought, into inventions of his mind, into things immaterial, hypothetical. He did something and at the same time dissolved it into the imaginary. He had and did not have weight, he stood and did not stand upon the earth. But every so often he was paralyzed by the most terrifying awareness, by the irrevocable, the inescapable, by the fact that there lay opposite him the lifeless body of the mercenary, Yuri’s body, by the fact that all this had now once and for all taken place, and he himself was as if wedged fast, as if they had nailed him into some hole somewhere and it was impossible to move, and then, again flat on the floor, he writhed with stifled hoarse moans that nevertheless ended in inarticulate cries. Yet despite his agitation, once dawn began to break, his mind started working again. […]”
This passage renders with precision a condition of acute psychic disorganization. Elias acts and at the same time detaches himself from his action; he recognizes the irrevocable and at the same time attempts to shift it into an almost immaterial region, where responsibility is blunted and reality loses its full weight. This division does not constitute a simple vacillation, but a rupture of consciousness. The phrase “He stood and did not stand upon the earth” conveys with exceptional accuracy the disturbance of contact with the real.
This disconnection advances into a more intense form of depersonalization, as Elias experiences one part of himself as an external observer, as an “outside gaze” that supervises and organizes.
“[…] Already, as a continuation of the previous split between cold reason and his disturbed consciousness, he feels a part of himself standing outside his very body, opposite him, overseeing, calculating, devising tactics. And the presence of this outside gaze of his own, while it watches him, at the same time strengthens him, keeps his breathing from turning into an unceasing sigh, although he hears his inhalations and exhalations in broken intervals, his lungs inflating and deflating slowly. His thought confuses the images, the flow of images on his retina, almost like multiple faint reflections in the windows and shopfronts of crowded streets.”
Here the fragmentation of consciousness assumes a spatial form. Elias is presented not only as inwardly divided, but as if partly stepping outside himself in order to monitor and direct himself. This “outside gaze” has a double function: it controls and at the same time contains; it organizes practical movements and restrains emotional collapse. The slowing of the breath and the “multiple faint reflections” render the psychosomatic tension of a mind unable to process reality in a linear way and therefore receiving it in fragments and unstable reflections.
Disorganization reaches its deepest level when the very function of memory and recognition of faces is struck. Elias has difficulty clearly recalling even the forms of those closest to him; what remains is not the face as visual unity, but a trace, a concept, an unstable contour of identity.
“Yet how strange: in memory only something of the outline of their masses is preserved, a little of the movement, and if some limb of their body in particular, it is a rough brushstroke, never a whole of clear, distinct lines, and even their faces, especially these, when he tries to immobilize them they end up dark funnels, dark pencil-shaded hollows in the place of their heads, but perhaps this is the way faces are generally registered in memory; he tried to recall his own people, only one piece of them was fleetingly illuminated, then it darkened again, was sucked into the funnel, yet at the same time their identity hovered more or less like a concept above this funnel, like a written word, though neither written nor a word, only its content, the concept of the distinct person. A dark funnel, blurred and fleeting details, and at the center the concept not the word, ‘my mother,’ for example. Indeed, he found it difficult to stabilize in his mind even the face of his mother.”
This passage is exceptionally important, because it records a crisis of memory that carries with it a crisis in the sense of identity. Faces are not recalled as clear forms, but as “dark funnels,” as voids around which only the concept of the person hovers. The distinction between visual form and the “concept of the distinct person” shows that memory has been severed from its sensory fullness. Familiarity survives abstractly, not representationally. This is a powerful sign of psychic estrangement: the crisis concerns not only the present trauma, but also the protagonist’s ability to connect form, memory, and relation.
The sequence of these passages substantially prepares the dream that follows. Before entering the dream scene proper, the narrative has already led Elias into an intermediate region where trauma, memory, depersonalization, and the dissolution of form are interwoven. The dream of Chapter III does not appear as an isolated nightmarish episode, but as the continuation of an already active psychic dysregulation. Consciousness has been ruptured, memory has blurred, the body and faces have lost their stability. Within this condition, the dream will give a more condensed and more symbolic form to the guilt, the loss, and the anguish of accountability that have already taken root within Elias’s psyche.
4. The Dream of Chapter III: Traumatic Retrieval and the Scene of Accountability
At this point, the dream comes as a condensation of the psychic disorganization that has preceded it. The dream material does not open a new level of experience, but gives more symbolically concentrated form to what has already been activated: the murky depth of memory, the impossibility of stable recognition, the experience of remainder, and the pressure of responsibility.
“His sleep, shallow and anxious, did not last long. He was fishing somewhere with a rod, perhaps at the curve of the old harbor, but with the waters withdrawn, the seabed like a muddy hollow, the image in any case confused, yet a little farther beyond the end of his line, which he too could not see where exactly it sank, there was something like a rectangular pit filled with lime. Then two others appeared beside him, classmates and companions from long ago, vanished for years, one asks the other, ‘Hey, what’s in there?’ pointing to the oblong white surface, ‘Lime,’ answers the second, who gives it a shove, as if to make sure, and falls headfirst into the pit. Then he was slow to surface […] At last it burst up like a bubble and only the diver’s shoe floated on the surface of the lime, and Elias seized it and was pulling out of it something like a white soft worm the size of a man’s foot, which, so to speak, was the larva of the rash diver, and with the anxiety of what answer he would give to the rash diver’s father—with the figure of the father meanwhile also present in the dream, blurred, farther off there—how he would account to him for what had happened to his son, with all his strength he stretched the white larva from its ends, so that it might unfold, might expand again into the full form of his old classmate.”
The reference to a sleep “shallow and anxious” shows that the traumatic material remains active and immediately permeates the dream substance. The first scene, fishing in the “old harbor” with the “waters withdrawn” and the “muddy” bottom, composes an image of searching in a turbid depth. The act of retrieval is attempted, yet its object remains indistinct. Elias casts his line toward a point he cannot visually control, as though trying to touch something submerged and at the same time inaccessible.
The “rectangular pit filled with lime” introduces an image of cold delimitation and concealment. Lime covers, seals, and effaces the traces of what has been buried. Its whiteness is associated here with sterilization and the suppression of every visible remainder. The dream defines a site where the traumatic has already sunk into a regime of concealed presence. The appearance of the two former classmates gives the dream a retrospective dimension, not as recollection properly speaking, but as the activation of older psychic material within a dramatic scene. The question “what’s in there?” turns toward the hidden core of the scene. The monosyllabic answer, “Lime,” intensifies the sense of completed covering, while the classmate’s headlong plunge into the pit transforms curiosity into an act of dangerous descent.
Anxiety is organized around the delay of resurfacing. The diver is slow to re-emerge and, when at last something appears on the surface, it is only his shoe. The body is absent; its presence is reduced to a detached object. The shoe functions as a trace, as the residue of a form that has withdrawn. What follows is that Elias pulls from the shoe a white, soft, worm-like body, the “larva” of the diver. The human form has by now been reduced to organic matter in an indeterminate state. The face has receded, and in its place there remains a latent, unfinished, almost embryonic existence.
The central psychic event of the dream is Elias’s effort to restore form where only residue has survived. He stretches the larva “with all his strength,” attempting to return it to the “full form” of the old classmate. This gesture condenses an imperative of reparation that exceeds the possibilities of the scene itself. Equally decisive is the presence of the diver’s father, however blurred, in the background of the dream. With this presence, the scene assumes the character of accountability. Elias is tormented by the question of the speech he owes: how he is to explain, how he is to answer, how he is to stand before the loss. The paternal figure functions as a silent center of judgment.
The dream of Chapter III organizes the traumatic material with great coherence as submerged, sealed, residual, and only partially retrievable. The desire to restore form remains active, yet its fulfilment escapes the limits of the dream-world. Thus, the dream gives its most concentrated form to what has already unfolded in the preceding pages: the experience of trauma as inner submergence, the disorganization of memory, the impossibility of stable recognition of the face, and, finally, the demand for accountability before a loss that admits of no reparation.
5. Synthesis: The Function of Dreams in the Narrative and in Elias’s Psychic Economy
The dream scenes of Elias occupy an organic place in the composition of The Death of the Mercenary, because they gather into images, displacements, and distortions psychic material that proves incapable of receiving direct, stable, and elaborated articulation. Their significance concerns at once the psychological delineation of the central figure and the broader narrative economy of the novel, since within them are crystallized the pressure of memory, the erosion of self-image, the experience of guilt, and the impossibility of symbolic reparation.
The pre-dream scene of Chapter II offers the initial pattern governing the sequences that follow. Elias encounters himself as image. His presence is severed from its inward bearer and appears as an apparition of himself. The narrative thus introduces a condition of primary division in which the subject ceases to coincide with itself. This initial fissure constitutes the core of the dream experience that follows.
The first dream lays bare an experience of inner dysregulation that traverses body, familiar space, and self-perception. Organic pressure remains unresolved, the passage toward release is blocked, the house appears already fissured, and the self-image returns as a wounded apparition. The regression toward a space of stored childhood memory intensifies this instability, while the final anatomical deformation of the figure completes the transition into a world in which the familiarity of body and space has already been corroded. The dream inscribes with precision an experience of psychic suffocation: discharge is suspended, form is destabilized, and inner space ceases to offer protection.
The opening of Chapter III transfers this dysregulation from dream-space into traumatic awakening itself. Yuri’s death immediately provokes associative collapse, fragmentation of consciousness, depersonalization, and the disorganization of memory. The experience of the event does not remain within the present of recognition, but sweeps Elias into a deeper stratum of memory, where violence, fear, humiliation, sexual embarrassment, and childhood and adolescent traces return. His consciousness is split in two, an “outside gaze” attempts to control him, while the faces of others lose their distinct form and survive only as dark outlines or abstract concepts. The narrative thus shows that, even before the dream of Chapter III appears, Elias has already entered a region where memory, trauma, and reality are no longer clearly distinguishable.
The dream of Chapter III transfers this crisis into the field of loss and responsibility. The movement of retrieval from a murky depth, the pit of lime, the shoe as detached trace, and the larva as white remainder of form compose a sequence in which traumatic material appears only in the form of residue. The lost face remains inaccessible as integral presence. What is retrieved belongs to the region of fragment and diminution. Elias’s effort to restore the “full form” of the classmate condenses the desire for reparation, while the appearance of the paternal figure gives the scene the weight of accountability. Guilt thus assumes the form of an inner demand for speech, for explanation, for apology.
The sequence of these scenes gives the psychological delineation of Elias a clear progression. In the first phase, the rupture of self-image predominates. In the first dream, this is followed by the dysregulation of the body and of familiarity. At the beginning of Chapter III, this crisis is transformed into traumatic awakening, into fragmentation of consciousness and decomposition of memory. In the dream of the same chapter, the same trajectory receives its most concentrated symbolic form, as a scene of retrieval, residue, and accountability. This development allows the narrative to render with particular precision the depth of the protagonist’s inner crisis. Dreams and pre-dream zones of disorganization constitute the space where the plot is interiorized, transformed, and brought to its fullest psychic intensity.
For this reason, Elias’s dream scenes constitute one of the crucial interpretive axes of the novel. Within them are condensed the decay of self-image, the alteration of familiarity, the return of older layers of memory, the impossibility of discharge, the fragmentation of consciousness, and the insistent yet futile search for reparation. Elias emerges from this dream and para-dream material as a deeply fissured figure, one who bears the weight of loss together with the difficulty of transforming it into knowledge, narrative, and linguistically articulated reconciliation.
6. Visionary Fulfilment: From Fragmented Consciousness to Poetic Continuity
In the later chapters of the novel, Elias’s fragmented consciousness is led not toward psychological restoration, but toward another form of synthesis, liminal and visionary. The scene of the sixth chapter, before the suicide, decisively shifts the field of experience. Yuri returns neither as a nightmarish residue nor as a figure activating panic, guilt, or deforming fantasy, but as a sensorially full presence: Elias smells him, hears his breathing, feels “the texture of his skin, the breathing of his pores, the veins in his arm,” hears “his voice with its living cords wholly alive.” This detail is of particular importance, because it reverses the logic of the preceding dream and hallucinatory scenes. Where the body had been presented as fragmented, the self-image as wounded, faces as sunk into dark funnels, and memory as unable to stabilize form, here the figure of the dead acquires integral materiality and quiet certainty. This visionary return does not constitute a denial of death, but a transformation of it into an experience of coexistence. For this reason, the Castle scene, with its diffused light, the mounted progression, the effortless conversation, the silence, and the acts of care, constitutes a late regathering of the relationship: not a recovery of the lost world, but a poetic and almost initiatory completion of the bond within the very space of loss. The final injunction, “Be still…,” thus functions as a reversal of all the preceding agitation, as the verbal trace of a serenity that does not abolish the tragic, but inwardly transfigures it.
This completion is carried, at the close of the seventh chapter, from the private horizon of Elias into the wider, poetically expanded horizon of Merope. The narrative leaves behind the closed interiority of the traumatized subject and opens into a perspective in which loss is transmuted into image, memory, and continuity. Merope’s vision of the two horsemen, Elias and Yuri, receding toward the horizon, reintroduces the motif of the riders’ progression, but detaches it from the sphere of individual self-annihilation and inscribes it within an order of endurance that exceeds biological termination. Her later pregnancy, the birth of the twins, and their naming as Elias and George do not constitute mere psychological consolation or a conventional replacement of loss; they amount to a symbolic reformulation of death as duration. The two dead do not “return” as resurrected persons, but as figures diffused into vision, memory, genealogical continuity, and childhood sight. In the final beach scene, where Merope momentarily thinks she beholds “the two of them” and in the end there remain only “two people riding,” the text deliberately preserves the ambiguity between reality, recollection, and visionary faith. Precisely there, however, lies its final power. The novel closes neither with the healing of fragmentation nor with the effacement of trauma, but with its passage into a region where what has been lost does not cease to exist: it changes form, changes bearer, changes mode of presence. Thus, the initial disorganization of consciousness finds its ultimate shape not in the restoration of an integral subjectivity, but in a poetic and metaphysical expansion in which love, death, and memory are gathered into an order of deeper continuity.
