father, I see his final exploration. He arrives at the new place, his hair risen in astonishment, his mouth and eyes dumb. His toe scuffs a soft storm of sand, he kneels and his arms spread in pantomimic celebration, the immigrant, as in every moment of his life, arriving eternally on the shore of his Self�(368). Some critics conclude, on the basis of this passage, that the narrator is the little boy grown up.3 This inference can be supported by other internal evidence; for example, the narrator knowledge of a visit from Houdini comes from he family archives�(366). The full implications of this inference will be analyzed later; for now it is important to emphasize that the identification remains only inference: nowhere is the �explicitly identified as the little boy. Because the reader acquiesces to the convention of an anonymous narrator telling a story about characters known as Father, Mother, Mother Younger Brother, and the little boy, the introduction of �instead of e�does not remove the mystery. As other critics have maintained, the exceptional use of �can still refer to an anonymous narrator who names only an object of his narrative, not necessarily a relative.4 The ambiguity does not end there, for a third possibility is that the narrator is the little girl, Tateh daughter Sha. Since the Yiddish words for father and mother are Tateh and Mameh, she occupies a position in the narrative equivalent to that of the little boy. If Sha is the narrator, then the scene in which she and Jung mutually experience a moment of recognition or telepathy (43) makes more comprehensible the narrator otherwise inexplicable condemnation of Freud (39). Also, if Sha is the narrator, then the vivid detail in her recollection of a chance meeting with the little boy (104) becomes more comprehensible. There is yet a fourth possibility, that the editorial e�refers to both Sha and the little boy speaking together. At the end of the novel, in Atlantic City, the two children are depicted as ideal, telepathic playmates, in the spirit of Goethe lective affinities�or Shelley complementary lovers. 5 Although this possibility cannot be dismissed, it obviously creates new problems in examining the exceptional use of .�84
