SOURCE: Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. “Ambiguity and Narrative Levels: Christine Brooke-Rose's Thru.” Poetics Today 3, no. 1 (winter 1982): 21-32.

In the following essay, Rimmon-Kenan addresses the question of “Who is speaking?” in the narration of Brooke-Rose's Thru.

Whoever you invented invented you too

—Thru, p. 53

Visual exercises such as Wittgenstein's famous “rabbit-duck” figure (1969: 194)¹ or Escher's “white birds/black birds” interlacing (1972)² have often been evoked in studies not distinguishing between ambiguity and other types of plurisignificance (e.g., Wright 1976: 506-508). Attempting to develop a more sharply focused definition, I have identified the same puzzle pictures with ambiguity alone, differentiating it from cognate phenomena on the basis of the logical operation involved (1977: xi-xi, 3-26). Ambiguity, according to my narrow definition, is the “conjunction” of exclusive disjuncts, whereas double and multiple meaning are based on the conjunction of compatible readings, irony on disjunction, allegory on equivalence, and indeterminacy on the absence of any necessary logical...