Desire

The author uses the narrator’s infatuation with her colleague Vladimir in order to explore the controlling nature of desire. She introduces this thematic notion within the opening passages of the prologue. While describing her lifelong fascination with old men, the narrator says that what she likes “most about old men now, . . . and the reason I often feel that perhaps I am an old man more than I am an oldish white woman in her late fifties . . . is that old men are composed of desire. Everything about them is wanting” (1, Jonas’s italics). By identifying herself as an old man, the narrator is thus revealing that she identifies with the desire of elderly men. Indeed, she goes on to say that “They are guided by desire—their world is made up of their desires . . . they do not know or cannot imagine a kind of world that...