Student's Interpretation of Galloway

A classfellow helpfully sent along this intriguing engagement with the Galloway text. By all means, forward your own personal readings for the wider benefit.

I think Galloway is trying to draw an association between mental illness and continental thought as a similar psychological state. It reminds me of Hume's ideas about thought formation, and how everything is devoid of meaning in itself, but associating that object with sentiment transforms it. I imagine that if this were heavily internalized, there would be a loss of connection to the self, because the self is a construction of human sentiment. Skeptically speaking, there is no part of the human body which houses such an abstraction, and if so, which part? Where does your hand end and your forearm begin? The associations and names we come up with helps us understand the world, but through illusion.

Instead of witnessing events through the I, they witness it through the 3rd person perspective. This is supported in the text, such as on page 12:

The nice thing is that I need not be present when I am working. I
can be outside myself, watching from the corner of the room.

This also explains why all the interviews with the narrator are never addressed in the "I", and how the narrator explains her physical movements in terms of depersonalized, moving
objects. It reminds me, to some degree, of Buddhist philosophy, with the idea that meditating on word puzzles in order to achieve an altered state, where nothing is connected (no binary oppositions). I know that doubleness isn't necessarily binary opposition, but they both involve an association between sentiment and objects. Binary opposition is largely applicable to moral judgements, and judgement is attached to guilt. The narrator is making connections between her ....[paramour's] death that quite possibly don't exist so maybe she is at this point of crisis, and her mind is a point of conflict: the guilty, ascetic self associated with Calvanism and a depersonalized "object" of continental thought....The narrator's state of mind could be regarded as a "continentalist enlightenment," yet everyone "healthy" in the book seems to attach a sentiment of mental illness to her behaviour.