👥 = character introduction
🗂️ = organization/entity introduction
🎪 = an event
📍 = a place
💎 = an object
💡 = a concept
🖋️ = a referenced figure
🚩 = flagged for general reference
?? = might need to read this page again
The only writing I have read of Gass was an introduction to my copy of The Recognitions by William Gaddis. I am reading The Tunnel as part of an online discussion group, and I am responsible for leading discussion on a chapter late in the book.
"* * *"
2/2/24 Recap: With this book's first person narrative, I found it a trifle difficult to take notes in the manner I am accustomed to. I want to recount what I can recall. The book starts with a man who is resolved to finish a paper on Germany. He recounts that he is not German and his wife's lineage. He recounts his experience in Germany, his sentiments before the war, and then his role as consultant at the Nuremberg Trials.
🚩 Good insight into keeping a diary
This would be a reference to Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in the River Ouse, Sussex.
"* * *"
👥 Governali (?)
🖋️ Gide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/André_Gide
🖋️ Monet
👥 Martha
🖋️ Rilke
2/5/24 Recap: The narrator's interest in Rilke and typographical elements from News of the World(?)
🚩 The imagined reception of the paper
👥 Lou
👥 Herr Tabor, Jeanne, Gerhardt, Rudy. Meg & more, seemingly old acquaintances
🚩 Lies in tunnel dirt, what is remembered, of war, of hangings, of Nazis / remembering protesting
🚩 Hitler's grades
🚩 Reports (the narrators own or news?) from Germany inset
🚩 End of rat tat section
🚩 There seems to be one consistent typographic element for these notes on Germany's treatment of the Jews.
🚩 Memories of Sundays from narrator
🚩 Star of David typographical element
🚩 What parents tell their children of the world
🖋️ Milton, Vermeer, Calderon, Baudelaire, Frege, Fourier, Degas, Heidegger, Veline
The indifferent potentialities of death and who dies.
🖋️ Kafka, The Penal Colony, Nietzsche