Hearing voices / In 'The Keep,' Jennifer Egan stakes out new territory, combining the ordinary with the supernatural in Eastern Europe:
She says 'The Keep' is 'the perfect antidote' to 'Look at Me.' The book begins with Danny, a semi-shady, punkish character of unspecified employment, arriving at an Eastern European Gothic castle late one night. His cousin Howard has summoned Danny to help him convert the castle into a hotel, but the cousins share a secret from childhood that makes Danny, and the reader, nervous about Howard's true motivation. well sure.
By setting the story in this "Gothic, 'Turn of the Screw' " environment, cut off from the contemporary world, she sets the stage for questions about the overlap between disembodied voices in the classic ghost story sense, and voices that we all hear every day. hmm so that's what she is thinking about overall here (or at least one of the whats)~ read the story as about telecommunications--ghosting. "The questions had to do with telecommunications, and how it parallels eh supernatural experience. What does it mean that we are engaged in disembodied communication all day long?" she asks. "You see someone walking down the street having an animated conversation, you don't think, 'Oh they're in la-la land,' you think, 'Oh, they're on the phone.' And they may actually be in la-la land, in which case they actually are hearing voices and responding to them. Gee, that's an awful lot like being on the phone. At a certain point, what's the difference?" 1) no, at the first point. 2) however there is a difference. is the voice from within or from without? 3) or that may be an unreal question, if a voice from within is experience no less as a given, an experience that happens to you, that one suffers. if you're relation to it is unaffected by it being (or believing it to be) within (your own self) or without (other - eh).