So what then is the disaster that has created this time anomaly? I think that too can be discerned by a careful reading between the lines. Due to his amnesia, it's unknowable how many times he has actually lived through the cycle, or if all the versions of him we follow throughout the book are actually the same person. Through the diary entries it is suggested that he experiences the complete loop, and that he is present in the city both before his arrival, and after his exit. He enters at one point of time, and exits at another, but yet in some sense he, or some other version of him, has always been there. The narrator/main-character is one of the archetypal inhabitants of the city. As part of this, the city is self-renewing.

Thus, the events that are in the recent past at the beginning of the book are in the near future at the end of the book. Compare also Diana Wynne Jones' Tale of Time City.) Events there are cyclical, they happen over and over again -not necessarily identically, and not necessarily with the same cast. (Closed time loops are a favorite of Delany's -he explored one, less successfully, in Empire Star. I believe its 'riddle' was never meant to be 'solved.'' With that said, I do have my own, unprovable theory on how Bellona is constructed: The entire city is in a closed time loop. What was it? Looking for either authoritative answer or revelations from the novel regarding how or why the disaster happens to Bellona.Īs William Gibson famously observed (in his forward to the Vintage Edition), Dhalgren 'is not there to be finally understood. (or is it? Or will it?) The disaster may have caused something very weird to happen with time, because sometimes burned buildings are back the way they were and sometimes they aren’t. The disaster, which has included riots and fire, lack of electricity and infrastructure, still intermittently seems to going on in the Kid’s present. Into this disaster zone comes a young man-poet, lover, and adventurer-known only as the Kid. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. Something has happened there … The population has fled. Delany’s Dhalgren became his most commercially successful endeavor.įirst published in January, 1975 by Bantam, Dhalgren has sometimes been described as an experimental novel, or a circular novel.īellona is a city at the dead center of the United States.

Samuel r delany's dhalgren