The narrator's fantasies are another theme in the story. Throughout the story the reader must always keep in mind what the narrator himself mentions on several occasion: The story of Dean and Anne-Marie is an uncertain mixture of reality and the narrator's own imagination. Though he initially appears somewhat normal, it is clear that the narrator has a strange and even disturbed psychology; if one does not understand how his neuroses affect both the form and content of the story, the novel will be completely misunderstood.