SOURCE: "Time, Space & Consciousness in the Fantasy of Peter S. Beagle," in San Jose Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, February 1975, pp. 52-61.

In the following essay, Becker explores Beagle's manipulation of time and space.

In Peter Beagle's first novel, A Fine and Private Place, Jonathan Rebeck, the hero, has lived surreptitiously in a New York cemetery for nineteen years, aided by a talking raven who steals food for him from local stores. Rebeck would rather be dead, like the ghosts he talks with until they forget and fade from life. The kind and sociable Rebeck has become a reluctant teacher of the newly dead; he tells the ghosts Michael and Laura: "You'll drowse…. In time sleep won't mean anything to you … it won't really matter." But Michael, a suicide who values life now that his is over, rejects the somnolent peace of Rebeck's art of dying, and he tells Laura...