SOURCE: "Days and Nights, Novel of a Deserter," in Alfred Jarry, Twayne Publishers, 1983, pp. 60-91.

In the following excerpt, Stillman discusses the symbols and themes of Days and Nights: Novel of a Deserter, emphasizing the significance of the protagonist's double, or doppelgänger.

[In Days and Nights: Novel of a Deserter] Sengle, having been drafted, loses himself in reveries of Valens, his double, to avoid the misery of life in uniform. Sengle's homoerotic, narcissistic love for his fraternal double allows him to contemplate his own image projected outside of himself: Valens is Sengle himself at a younger age, imagined by Sengle as his younger brother. Their specularity, however, is not that of the cold and immediate reflection of a mirror. It is mediated by a curvaceous and fluid space that has replaced time. By abandoning the ordinary constraints of space and time, Sengle restructures his experience and thus...