The effect is very much like the tendency for a person’s thoughts to be suddenly derailed by concern about some potentially bad outcome to what is happening, eventually followed by a sudden snap back to reality. Our only clue to his mind’s shifts from reality into “horrible dreams” is the sudden recognition of the outlandishness of what he is describing. Then, just as abruptly, he will shift back to the actual present and continue narrating his story, without any acknowledgement of the disturbing digression that has occurred. In the middle of describing some scene - driving down the road, walking through a town or simply considering what to do next - his description will suddenly descend, without warning, into a startlingly bleak and often violent subsequent sequence of events. These nightmarish visions introduce a surreal aspect to the story, as they come upon him without warning. The narrator complicates our understanding of these events already in the opening pages of the novel, however, giving us fair warning of his general unreliability: “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.” (4) A few paragraphs later he reveals that he was so impacted by the girl having left him that his “drugs prescribed for produced horrible dreams … not confined to sleep only.” (6) This internal confusion becomes apparent in his relationship with her: each time he finds her she rejects him so strenuously that he eventually gets fed up with her and leaves to get on with his life - only to be helplessly drawn back to searching for her again, at seemingly any cost to his welfare or sanity.
In the intervening years, his disenchantment has transformed into a bipolar obsession for her that leaves him swinging wildly between deep concern for her well-being, and imagining her subjected to extreme violence. He recalls his bitter disappointment when the girl left him in their youth for another man.
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