I recently finished James Dickey’s novel, *To the White Sea* and have a question about the ending.
Throughout the book, there are many scenes where Sergeant Muldrow’s prose veers off the path of reality and into day dreaming or fantasy, mainly around visions of the Alaskan wilderness and the animals that populate it.
There are also scenes where he is able to >!intuit a human presence, such as when in the monastery!<.
So when it comes to the ending, Muldrow’s narration to us is that >!there are soldiers surrounding the shack he is living in that have tracked him and are there to capture or kill him. That seems somewhat like a statement of fact, as he intuits them surrounding the shack, but his reaction – to transmogrify into a swan – seems rooted firmly in insanity and fantasy.!< So my question is, Are Muldrow’s accounts of the final pages of the book meant to be literal or one of his dreams/fantasies?
Initially I took them as literal, but it just doesn’t sit right with me. Muldrow’s whole mindset is that the further north he goes the >!less people he will see and the closer to nature he will be!<. So it seems extremely unlikely that in the farthest reaches of the wilderness, he is somehow >!tracked down by Japanese soldiers from the main island, especially considering this would likely be in the summer of 1945 when the war was just about concluded? How could the Imperial Army afford or want to dispatch a search to the remote corners of the northern island?!<
I searched online for some analyses of this book and found some good ones, but none of them talked about the ending in any depth.
by AnyJamesBookerFans