Santos once singled out [The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor] as his favorite among the novels he had written (in Grow, Interview).¹ Among the reasons Santos specified is that “It's a sad story, but I think it's very funny in parts” (in Grow, Interview). If so, it is funny only to the aficionado of whimsicality. The admirer of Dickens' eccentrics might see the novel in this light, but it seems to me much more likely to strike the reader as a very disquieting story—much more akin tonally to Kipling's “The Gardener” than to, say, Tom Jones. It might even be classified as a tale of at least suspense if not terror—and Santos' own remarks about his creation pinpoint the reasons. Speaking of Filipinos as a whole, he has remarked,

We still retain some of the vagueries of the past, you know. There is very strong in us a kind of belief, a superstition, you know, like for instance in the whole book you find evident there a superstition that some people may be extensions of other people or also the belief that there are ways of telling what dreams mean. And if ever it touches superstitions about our people who are about to die, they keep dreaming about their parents, and they know when they're going to die if their parents, in their dreams, offer them things to eat, and they eat them, then they'll die, you see (In Grow, Interview).

Cf., Bresnahan, Conversations 96

In this context, the novel's conclusion is chilling, since Sol's dead mother appears in a dream and “offered him a candy bar. ‘From Luz,’² she said as he reached out to receive it, for you. She has been keeping it since liberation when a G. I. Joe³ gave it to her. She asked me to give it to you, saying “‘To sweeten his way’” (RT [The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor] 173).

Yet RT is not histrionic—in fact, it is precisely the understated quality of this novel which conduces to its success. RT is as methodical in its narrative as death is firmly inexorable in its engulfing of life. And death is both the last word—the note on which the novel ends—and its chief theme throughout. How does it open? “Sunday, June 8, 1969, Robert Taylor died in Hollywood of lung cancer” (RT 2). And this fact is underscored in a little dagger construction on the next page: “So Robert Taylor was dead.” Immediately, we find out that Solomon King works in the Chicago stockyards, a place of death. Very shortly thereafter, we are regaled with the particulars of Sol's employment at Swingle's Funeral Home, where the mortician's art can “make the dead look warm, alive, like the heart's beating all right” (RT 24). This section is immediately followed by an intercalary interlude iterating the entertainment to be expected at a Philippine wake.⁴ The funeral motif is continued in the next chapter, where Sol, in the waiting room of Dr. Noah Harm,⁵ observes Col. Jesus Padilla: “His face was heavily wrinkled, the texture of leather,⁶ an embalmed body without the beauty treatment” (RT 27). And Padilla's calling card has an interestingly ironic ring to it:

Col. Jesus Padilla, AFP, Ret.
Veteran of World Wars I & II
                    Life Member

(RT 27)

Life member of what? Certainly not the AFP, for that referent is ruled out by the designation “Ret.” Is he a life member of both wars? On the assumption that the scars inflicted by war never heal, this would, in its mordant way, be accurate, especially granted the ironic twist supplied by “Life” (“Death Member” might fit the bill better).⁷

The next chapter is occupied solely by Sol's recollections of his abusing father, a recollection triggered by the need to supply a beneficiary on an insurance form. But this daydream concludes, as we might anticipate, with death:

Sol was still in the grades when his father died in a distant province in Mindanao where he had gone presumably to work on an American-owned pineapple plantation. Sol was not sure whether the body was ever brought home. He had never seen his father dead.

Soon after, his mother died, too … a religious fanatic, she died in church, her head between her hands on the communion rail after thirty days of continuous fasting.

(RT 36)

Again, we have strongly-etched irony—death brought on by overzealous practice of a religion promising everlasting life.

A later chapter finds Sol in his apartment. “He watched Chicago age suddenly under flakes of snow that clung on buildings and trees in the parks, everywhere. Chicago, you are dying too, he told the skies.” Then he concludes that “It was too beautiful a world to die” (RT 105). This morbidity continues as Sol muses over the 1969 American lunar expedition:

What thrilled Sol was the expectation of disaster: the moon surface opening under to swallow them, the lunar module failing to take off, or on the way back, somehow their spacecraft failing to break its lunar orbit in its rush to the earth through that narrow space the sensitive instruments from the earth had pinpointed. The idea of a spacecraft with the astronauts inside, in a perpetual orbit around the moon, chilled him.⁸ What a way to go. As if the way mattered.⁹ It was the waiting. Which of the four seasons was it going to be? Again, did it matter? Each season was tinged with its own color of death.

(RT 105-106)

Space and time offer no havens: “There was no beating Mr. Death. Have all your heart transplants, the time comes in its season” (RT 106).¹⁰ Sol notes that “Soon after Robert Taylor, Judy Garland went, a hag at forty-seven” and “In the fall, his favorite person because he liked the way he spoke and looked, like one of the venerable uncles of his childhood, died, too. But Senator Dirksen had lived a full life” (RT 106).¹¹ Jaime Pardo represents death in another form. Having been separated from his wife, he has retreated from life, but this is a mental as well as a physical decision: “Long before they were separated, J. P. had already separated himself from her—from the rest of the world, he felt—and now dwelt in the realm of books” (RT 119).¹² It is fitting, then, that he works in a warehouse which stores insurance records. How ironic it is that “The human heart, that was all that concerned him now as he supervised the filing of records of persons all over the continent who had mortgaged a bit of their lives against possible death” (RT 120).

Even during the joyous interlude with Blanche, “He was absolutely certain … that the end was near, but how near and when, this he did not know and did not wish to know” (RT 125). Near the end of the next chapter, Sol states emphatically, “Well, I'm dying” (RT 149). An entire page of dialogue follows this comment, all concerned with how a person knows when his/her number is up.

On his trip to Washington, Sol muses: “After all, he had a hoard of memories. He had seen riots, watched cities burn, men screaming in panic like hogs speared into running toward their death in their long and narrow pens. …” (RT 154). Among the kaleidoscopic procession of images Sol conjures up when he falls asleep are “Arlington Cemetery while a caisson draped in the Stars and Stripes rolled by, with soldiers marching to the ruffle of silent drums” (RT 155) and an old tourist couple whom he imagines dead in the back seat of a cab he is driving. He thinks that “Mr. Swingle must have worked hard at them” (RT 156).

After Sol arrives in Washington, he starts trying to look up old acquaintances but has little success locating them. One whom he does find, Noli, informs him about the others: “Most of 'em are dead now” (RT 157). Conversing with Noli reminds Sol of the days when the two of them idled at Benny's Barber Shop, the proprietor of which drove a Cadillac that his customers tell him, jokingly, “belonged to a funeral home” (RT 158). After Noli “wins” a yo-yo contest, his fingers are so damaged that the sight of them pains Sol, who says that Noli's pay for the job awarded to him as a contest winner is “so good, you could afford a grand funeral” (RT 162). Noli tells Sol that “Pinoys … prefer to die in their rooms” (RT 162), rather than in hospitals or nursing homes. These men are, Ruth avers, “Just waiting to die” (RT 164). A specific death, of Pete, the physical culture enthusiast, is the result of swallowing a fishbone (RT 164). And in a bit of foreshadowing, at the close of his visit to the nursing home, Barbara enjoins him, “Be sure you don't catch your death out in that cold” (RT 172).

Death comes insidiously, however, often as a gradual erosion of the self rather than as a sudden, unitary event. As time goes on, Sol finds that his memory starts to fail him: “he noticed that now he had a tendency to forget what used to be the most familiar things: names, words, scenes, lines from the poems he had been reciting all his life on occasions for no reason at all, songs. Most of the lyrics of the songs he loved lay buried in graveyards unknown to him” (RT 105). Granted that we accept Thomas Reid's argument that memory is the guarantor of selfhood, this is ominous. The most conspicuous means by which the identity problem is presented is the double. Only in Nabokov's Lolita do we have such an intricate handling of it.¹³ Early on, Sol thinks of himself and Robert Taylor as “twins” (RT 10) and before long that “his life and Bob's were one, in a manner of saying, one's life was an extension of the other” (RT 29). Two of King's girlfriends—Barbara and Ursula—have the same two given names as Robert Taylor's two wives (RT 96). Nor does Sol think that this intertwining is unique to himself: “He believed in Fate. In lives that are extensions of other lives. Like his and Robert Taylor's. That their lives followed a sort of pattern, running parallel but close, so close they touched at certain points ever so lightly but palpably, like pure coincidence—and mystical because unnatural” (RT 55).

And in fact other characters do have, at least to some extent, the same experience. For instance, Padilla remarks that “Princess Margaret and I have the same birthday” (RT 28) and, when Sol leaves the doctor's office, he puts Padilla's calling card and his own appointment card in the same pocket (RT 30), an appropriate gesture since he will see neither one again. In the boffo scene in which Sol addresses his speech class, we discover that “the instructor … sounded like the actor Edward G. Robinson and looked like him, too” (RT 52). As he listens to Sol's speech, “Edward G. Robinson's double was doubling with silent laughter somewhere in the rear of the room” (RT 53).

About midway in the novel is an apparently digressive shift of focus from Sol to Alipio Palma. But the relatively lengthy chapter (pp. 70-84) describing the visit of Antoneta Zafra and her sister Monica to Alipio is in fact integral. The compassion which Alipio displays in agreeing to marry Monica—a perfect stranger—so that she won't be deported is on a plane with the kindness which Sol extends to Blanche and Jerry in the bus station—taking two strangers home with him. The parallelism here is subtly reinforced by Alipio's oracular pronouncement “God dictates” (RT 84), which is the sort of “Philosophy of Life” for which Sol was casting about earlier (pp. 55-56).¹⁴ And the Alipio scene is followed immediately by the contrapuntal Artemio Banda episode. Banda¹⁵ represents another calibration on the book's hospitality measuring instrument. Monica is invited to stay a lifetime, Blanche and Jerry a week, and Banda not really a microsecond. The latter is purely tolerated and finally pitched out.

An interlude parallel to the Alipio chapter appears on pp. 109-120. Jaime Pardo is, in a geographical sense at least, the concave side of Sol. Sol prospers in America while Pardo is ruined when he returns to the Philippines. Pardo is referred to as “J. P.,” but these initials, perhaps distantly echoing the magnate J. P. Morgan, could as well stand for “Jesse Padilla.” Noli's victory in the yo-yo contest is really a re-enactment of Sol's father's triumph in Arnis—both are meaningless developments of dexterity.

As much as the alter egos undercut discreet, unitary selfhood, they are not the only undermining elements at work. In the first place, even the doubles are tenuous. The title of the novel has “Thought He” in parentheses, thus making the Sol-Robert Taylor identification much less assured than it otherwise would have been.¹⁶ And corroboration of Sol's perception is hard to come by. Puzzled, Sol asks at the outset, “Why hadn't anyone remarked on the similarity?” (RT 10-11). Sol constantly surmises that others see the resemblance, but this surmise has little external verification; e.g., “Mostly Polish girls in the neighborhood who must have seen, though they did not say it, his resemblance to Robert Taylor” (RT 11). Although people do detect a resemblance between Sol and some actor, Mr. Swingle's inability to complete the comparison is typical:

“You could be an actor. As a matter of fact, you remind me of one.”

But Mr. Swingle could not remember whom he looked like.

(RT 24)

Morningstar, in fact, tells Sol, “You look like yourself, silly.”

(RT 59)

And this business about identity transcends the boundaries of the physical body.¹⁷ Sol knows next to nothing about his lineage: “Filling up forms always served to remind him how little he knew of his parents. He didn't know who his grandparents were on either the maternal or the paternal side. Nor did he know his own parents' birthdays. … That he knew his own birthday was a fortuitous result of having to give it every time he registered for enrollment in school” (RT 33). And when in the penultimate chapter Sol visits Barbara, it is clear that identity has not been fully attained: “they might find, hopefully, each other's true identity” (RT 170).

This precarious sense of identity is reflected in the dislocation, even disorientation, which Sol periodically feels:

It was downtown Chicago that called to him most of the time, the business district where there was movement and a spell and as far as he was concerned, without boundaries and directions. Until now he could not tell for certain what the northside or southside was except that they were opposites as were the east and the west and that State and Madison cut the city in two.

(RT 15)¹⁸

Where had all his friends gone? Who were they? He should write to those who would most likely remember him. None of them lived in New York. What was he going there for? To ride the ferry he had never taken all the years he was there? Crane his neck, as he always did, to see the topmost floor of the skyscrapers? The dome of the Empire State Building? What for?

(RT 106-107)

Now he remembered, in those early times, he played a game inventing friends. Perhaps most of the friends he thought he had in New York had only been an invention. What then was not an invention? In his present state of mind, he was not sure.

(RT 107)

Because there is no fixed self to relate to, all of Sol's liaisons ultimately crumble, a fact which he bemoans without understanding: “Why couldn't he tire of them before they tired of him? Why couldn't there be a permanent relationship, an eternal wanting? (RT 62).

National identity proves as elusive as personal identity. This is to be expected in a Santos tale, for, as Casper puts it (“Introduction” to SA xvi), “This is the recurring theme in Santos' work: how hard it always is, yet how important, to be Filipino at heart …,” but the theme looms particularly large in RT. The intercalary chapter on p. 37 presents the problem with a telephoned question to the Philippine Consulate: When is Philippine Independence Day? The caller thinks it's June 19th (Rizal's birthday), but his friend argues for July 4th. The office of the Cultural Attache, however, disabuses both of them of their false assumptions by informing them that the correct date is June 12th. When the caller asks, “How come June 12?” the response is “It's a long story.” The clouded question of when and, perhaps, even whether independent identity was achieved is further obfuscated by the question, “Who is Filipino?” At the annual Philippine Independence Day ball, a pesty “grasshopper-like man in barong” turns up:

The Filipino could do no wrong in his book. He kept a record of all Filipinos in the States who had made the news media. He argued against those who insisted that some of the persons in his list were not Filipinos, that they only had Filipino-sound-names, that they could be South American or Spanish.

(RT 43-44)

But the man has no logical basis for his determination of who is Filipino and who is not, as we shortly see:

“What about that guy who killed his wife and all their children, six of 'em? He got a Filipino name, no?”

“He's no Filipino. Some other nationality, maybe. But not Filipino, I'm sure.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“The newspapers don't say.”

(RT 44)

Another intercalary chapter involving the Philippine Consulate revolves around a visitor in search of purely Philippine superstitions. The consular office can be of no help: “There are no superstitions I know that are purely Filipino” (RT 122). Again, discrete identity is unattainable. Ironically, however, there is one—the one which constantly flashes across Sol's mind: “When a sick person begins to see his dead relatives in his dreams, that's bad” (RT 149). But this is a superstition entailing death, the final and irrevocable obliteration of identity, national or otherwise.

A technical means by which identity is assaulted is grainy language. The too-squeamish reader may miss the purpose of this raffish diction, writing it off as lapse of taste on the part of a mature author, but in fact it is functional. This is clearly evident in the audience reactions to the speeches at the Philippine Independence Day ball:

“A lot of shit.”

“Crap!”

“It's the same every goddamned time. …”

(RT 39)

As the scene progresses, we see the toll in human degradation which language like this exacts, not only on the targets to which it is directed, but on the users as well:

“These young doctors are only after the American dollar.”

“The American cunt.”

(RT 41)

The worth of the human self suffers devaluation here, obviously, and this is by no means the only place in the novel where it does. Again, the intercalary chapter parodying immigrant Filipinos' accent in English is more demeaning than rolicking, a little too close for comfort to the now disgraced Frito Bandito: “Kiss my hass”; “White ouse my dick” (RT 46); “their 'usbands har pucking around” (RT 47). Similarly, in another intercalary chapter we get “Lonely my balls!” (RT 69).

But this sort of coarseness is anything but an immigrant Filipino trademark. In fact, the cruder, because unfunny, remarks, are attributed to Americans. Sol realizes this when he applies for admission to college: “He wanted to say, blame the fucking war, but he was afraid he might be sent up to graduate school for using such language” (RT 50). As Sol gropes for a philosophy of life, he considers a piece of graffiti in a men's room: “See Wanda Supple, 69 4th St. S.W., after 5 pm if you wanna good fuck or blow job” (RT 56). Morningstar turns the air cobalt blue with such felicities as “Who's the goddamn woman poet you once quoted to me …”; “I'm your morning lay” (RT 59); “All we did—God almighty—for how long, was fuck” (RT 66). Ursula has studied at the same school of fine phrasing:

“Fuck my term paper.”

“The sponger?”

“Fuck him!”

(RT 95)

It is not only verbal degradation which diminishes human stature. The very act of procreation, which should be regenerative, here is tawdry and tarnishing, disruptive and dissatisfyingly transient, rather than a force for stability and permanence. Human bonding is actually prevented rather than facilitated, as Sol finds out from his serial affairs—all fornication of course, since he is unmarried, and adulterous in the case of Blanche. Jaime Pardo's indulgence, first in gambling, then in women, topple him. The element of reduction rather than elevation is conveyed in the sordidness of descriptions of sex:

Hey, you're rough, you know? Oops! Slipped.

(RT 58)

He jerked off without getting a hard-on as if he had simply pricked himself with a needle to let the blood out. It felt like it, too. The whore bit was worse. He could not be up to it, thinking of all the men who had mounted her, leaving a goodly portion of their filth in her, and such things as disease and pain, not to mention the disgrace of having to consult a doctor for treatment.

(RT 63)

Quoth the raven, nevermore, as it sank its claws into his crotch.

(RT 68)

His pajamas were soaking wet and sticky between his legs. … He thought he had been drained of all that stuff. And the damn thing was as limp as ever. He removed his pajama trousers and wiped himself. It had shrivelled into a mere nothing with neither shame nor pride, a neutral observer, shit!

(RT 147)

In less obtrusive ways, Santos manipulates wording so that it contributes to human degradation. Figures of speech, for instance, though often striking, are not used to sharpen juxtapositions or enhance the vividness of imagery so much as to whittle humanity down. An early simile might at first appear to work in the other direction: “he would begin to spray the polluted rooms with deodorizers, and later emerge from the fog of fragrant mist like a man who had at last found his soul” (RT 12). But to find one's soul in a cloud of deodorant? Quite cosmetic and mundane must this soul be. In Swingle's Funeral Home Sol sees a cadaver, “the naked wasted body, the pubic hair, lush and curly, the man's genitals, a dead worm in the jungle growth” (RT 20). Is this all that a man's potency finally amounts to? Except for the pervasive Loved One atmosphere, one might almost be reminded of Hamlet's “Alexander died” speech. Again in the vein of dark comedy, Sol tells his speech classmates that “Once when he told a girl he liked, “Your breath is as sweet as kine that feed in the meadows,” straight from “Evangeline,” the girl refused to see him after she found out that kine meant cows” (RT 54). So much for the efficacy of figurative language. A similar darkly comedic tone results from Mrs. Zafra's question to Alipio, “Where's the nearest grocery store around here?” since “like Pilate, she didn't wait for an answer” (RT 4). A final example involves Ursula: “In the half-lighted room her blonde hair shone like first-class hemp” (RT 95-96). This ranks with the kine of Evangeline.

RT bears the Santos brand in its portrayal of alienated, uprooted humanity, besieged incrementally by death. Identity crumbles amidst the instability of an unfathomable cosmos and dream slips into nightmare. In this cosmos, it is unwise to take candy from a nonstranger.

Notes

1. In later life he confirmed the choice (Santos, Saintly 59).

   because “The door has been left open too long” (RT 101). Sol is constantly planning an extended trip—no wonder he attends to the news about the most extended trip in human history. See Teoxin (100) for insight about the other implications of the cold weather.

2. That Luz should reappear at the end of the tale is perfectly predictable, of course, in keeping with Santos' penchant for paralleling openings and closings, especially since early on Sol, in the course of looking over his old pictures, finds one of her and recalls “the last time he had heard about her, American soldiers in her house, her own family selling PX goods on the black market” (RT 10). The parallelism is neatly complemented by the names; what could fit “Sol” (“sun”) better than “Luz” (“light”)? That this is a mere coincidence caused by a simple preference for Spanish names, is made clear by such direct suggestions as “Sweet, flower like Flora” (RT 117), whose last name, “Pardo,” makes her “brown flower,” and the almost too obvious “Solomon King,” the implication of which Casper (“Introduction” to SA xiv) has marked: “The lament of Solomon (a King Solomon less wise, and divided within himself) is played against a counterpoint of dialogues between anonymous Pinoys of his generation … ” Rimonte (43) goes even further, indentifying Sol with the European Sun King.

   The paralleling of names is done frequently and intricately. What better example can one find than Flora Pardo and Blanche Hardman? Not only do these names contrast in color (“brown” and “white”) and texture (soft and hard), their respective bearers are contrasts in character. Flora kicks out her husband of 25 years, Blanche welcomes Jerry's father and Sol (who in his own way expels her, thus turning the tables on what Flora does to J. P.). Flora has two miscarriages (she produces only death); Blanche has a healthy son (she brings life with her). J. P. confines himself to a cell like area of a warehouse—“The only time he would ever retire would be when they found him dead on the long board in the little cubicle he had chosen to spend the rest of his life” (RT 120); Jerry's father is incarcerated in the state penitentiary at Joliet.

3. This detail takes on ominous significance when we recall the grisly story which Sol tells Ursula about American soldiers killing Filipinos attempting to filch items—mostly junk—from an American compound shortly after the war: “The guards had an orgy shooting down the thieves” (RT 98). Thus Luz transmits death—nothing else—to Sol.

4. The similarity between Santos' procedure and Steinbeck's procedure has been explored by Teoxin (85-86), though Teoxin does not use the term “interealary.” The reader interested in pursuing the nuances of structure should consult Bresnahan (“Can” 134-136) and the fine elucidations of Lim (84-86) and Teoxin (85-86, 97-99, 103, 141, 143), I think it is certain that Rimonte (43), after pursuing these commentaries, would modify—if not abandon—the conclusion that “As a novel, the book is not structurally satisfying.”

5. Another name, obviously, which is really a label. It is appropriate enough for one whose vocation it is to save humanity to bear the name “Noah,” but one wonders whether the Biblical reference is not undercut somewhat by the near homonym “No Harm” or perhaps even “No” “ah” (the sound the patient is asked to make while the physician conducts the throat examination. Cf., Sol's recollection of his father Daniel, Arnis champion. Is this Daniel also in a lion's den?

6. It might not be too much of a stretch to find in this detail an implication of decay, granted its symbolic function in V. Santos has a habit of carrying over symbols, plot situations, character traits, etc., especially if they have strong personal connotations for him, from one work to the next. E.g., at the end of RT, when Sol dreams that his dead mother has brought him a candy bar, “Sol smelled at once the lime in her hair” (RT 173). We see how true was Santos' claim that “The one big thing I remember about my mother, and you can find this in my stories, is the smell of lime in her hair” (in Grow, “Harrowed” 7). Another case in point is the scent of apples, wafting through Santos' prose fiction, as it does on p. 154 of RT.

7. There is something of an ironic bite to Padila's listed U.S. residence, “Friendship, Wis,” granted the American soldiers “orgy” of shooting the Filipinos just after the end of World War II. Ursula, Sol's Lithuanian girlfriend, likewise knows about the memberships in war: “She talked about her parents, of a time when they ran away from some horror in her homeland” (RT 97).

8. This literally chilling vision of dead astronauts seems transparently a projection from the end of the preceding chapter. Ursula leaves for Michigan and Sol is chilled, even inside his apartment, because “The door has been left open too long” (RT 101). Sol is constantly planning an extended trip—no wonder he attends to the news about the most extended trip in human history. See Teoxin (100) for insight about the other implications of the cold weather.

9. Cf., the dialogue in the immediately preceding intercalary chapter, “Die here? Why not? As Rizal said, “El sitio nada importa” (RT 103).

10. This phrasing is reminiscent of “There is a season for every purpose under heaven,” no doubt by design.

11. The Dirksen reference is another touch of stinging irony, since, apparently, Sol feels the same sort of empathos with Dirksen as he does with Robert Taylor. Although we are told with a straight face that “Sol was an excellent story teller and he knew it” (RT 98), the evidence refutes this claim. Sol proceeds to tell Ursula, nursing a chronic sensitivity about World War II, the horror story about the American guards gunning down Filipino thieves. Even Sol later asks himself, “Why did he have to tell such stories?” (RT 100). In a more formal setting, Sol is equally in the weeds. In his rambling, comically inappropriate address in his speech class, he does hold the audience, but only because he makes such a fool of himself. After his audience members concede that they know nothing of the poets he mentions, he persists in not only referring to them but quoting from them. The result is all too predictable: “There was tittering from the girls in the back row”; “Edward G. Robinson's double [the professor] was doubling with silent laughter somewhere in the rear of the room”; “The class was in a mild uproar” (RT 53). But Sol's ineffectiveness is not solely due to his poor choice of material; his delivery also turns him into a buffoon: “He began haltingly, apologizing for his accent and the very personal nature of his talk” (RT 52).

12. He is the complement to Sol's mother, a religious fanatic in practice. J. P., as he styles himself, is a fanatic in theory: “No fiction for him, but books on philosophy, religion, the lives of the saints, Zen Buddhism, Christianity” (RT 119).

13. In fact, there are so many similarities between Lolita and RT that one wonders whether RT is designed as a double for Lolita, in order to make the double motif cosmic in its proportions. Both novels are set in America, and both involve a geographical chequerboard. In both, journeying is a major concern, although admittedly Sol does more pondering than travelling. Both involve chief protagonists with mirrored names—the reduplicative Humbert Humbert and the reversed Solomon King (King Solomon). Both novels have potentially shocking passages about sex, Lolita to the degree that it was initially banned in the U. S. as obscene. Although RT hasn't been formally banned, it no doubt is a rare purchase for the shelf of a high school library. In fact, its graphic diction probably would get it burned if another parental uprising were to occur in North Dakota. Both novels can be read as comedic—and to go further, on multiple levels of depth and complexity. And both are products of expatriate authors torn from their home countries by both war and political developments, as a result feeling very keenly the pain of alienation of the foreigner. The most complete handling of the Lolita/RT similarities is in Teoxin, pp. 88-90, 95-99, and 141.

14. The slogan Sol considers last, “Longfellow's ‘Life is but an empty dream’” (RT 56) proves to be a piece of highly sardonic situational irony, granted that RT closes with Sol's dream of accepting the candy bar from his dead mother.

15. Following Santos' Nabokov-like trail of multi-lingual clues, we might think of Banda as one who eats enough for an entire band of men and consider his home region, La Union, ironic, considering what a nuisance he is and thus how little Sol cares to link his company with Banda's. “Rosario” (“rosary”) could again be a finely-wrought concretization of what Sol thinks of as the working of Fate and what Alipio thinks of in terms of “God dictates.”

16. Virtually every critic has made this point. Cf., Fernandez (690), Lim (90-91), and Teoxin (142).

17. As Mr. Swingle's three-staged annihilation of bodily existence emphasizes: “What are all these bodies anyhow? Objects. Things. Nothings” (RT 21).

18. This seems to turn north and south, east and west, State and Madison into inanimate doubles. On a large scale, the same can be said of the regular chapters and the Grapes of Wrath style intercalary chapters. A roman type section has its italic type counterpart. Yet it is hard to track either set of chapters because the chapters are unnumbered, perfectly appropriate if their respective identities are as unfixed as Sol's identity is. And even with a set, juxtaposition invites questions about inanimate doubles. Cf., the mortician and the physician, pages 18-24 and 26-30, respectively, with an intercalary chapter about the conventions of the Philippine wake sandwiched between (page 25).