Randolph "Dilda" Carter

What if you were insane, but actually haunted by a real ghost? I'm not sure why nobody has ever really tried this before (Yellow Wallpaper doesn't count because it always calls the narrator's perceptions and mental stability into question).Drenched in philosophy, history, psychology, science, and autobiography Kiernan uses her encyclopedic knowledge to weave a tale so dense it is sometimes difficulty to see where she is going but fascinating nevertheless. Imp seems to be the ultimate unreliable narrator, but is she? And there seems to be a narrator's narrator. The plot, such as it is, twists and turns, never proceeding linearly for very long. Kiernan, through her narrator, even comments on this fact. Real life rarely proceeds linearly. It only seems that way in retrospect due to what we choose to accept and discard in the telling/remembering. History writing proceeds similarly since it almost always depends as much on what we discard or ignore in the telling as it does in what we conclude to accept. This is why we largely make the same mistakes over and over again even though the adage that "those who don't study history it are doomed to repeat" Study of history is almost useless as a prediction of the future because the distillation we make of history rarely resembles the plethora of currently known and unknown facts and "truths." The now almost never looks like the history we think we know. Otherwise, how can half the people think higher taxes are bad and half think they are good. One perspective must be "true" at this point in time but who knows for sure? Even when we are aware of the facts we accept and discard we cannot decide (if we are honest with ourselves), much less when we don't know, what we don't know.And Imp cannot make any sense of the past even though she studies, reflects, and writes. She has no idea where she is going and her past is no guide because she cannot decide what to accept and what to discard. She's not even sure when she is sane (Is she? maybe she is hyper-sane) and even has trouble deciding whether what she is writing is fact or truth. The distinction is essential. Truth does not necessarily imply factual and a fact doesn't always imply truth. Now we are back to what to accept and what to discard and our own faulty senses and memories and thinking just muddles the situation more. Now add to that that the supernatural is real. Anyone would lose their sanity.