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The History of Them All: Chapter 1-9

• The History of Them All: Chapters 1-9

• Leonard Cohen writes his novel as a stream of consciousness, where the narrator is living in a psycho-sexual hell.

• The narrator is unnamed and is a folklorist who has lost his wife and male lover.

• The novel is a story about the narrator's spiritual yearning in the orgiastic days of the mid- sixties.
• At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is suffering from constipation and depression.

• He calls to the blessed Iroquois woman, Catherine Tekakwitha, and remembers his lover, F. , who died from syphilis.

• The narrator wants to study Catherine not as a Catholic symbol, but as a human being.

• The narrator remembers his wife Edith's suicide where she was crushed and died on the elevator shaft.
• F. admits to sleeping with Edith and then comforts the narrator by performing oral sex on...

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