“And just when I thought that I could go no farther, and my feet had grown so heavy, and my flame flickered on a final inch of candle, and my clothes, torn to rags, fell from my body, I […] naked as a babe, found myself before a door, which, opening, revealed, in splendor and immensity, a dazzling, vanished world.”

This epigraph from the fictional Jeremiah Wylkes frames the novel’s central mythology through a carefully sustained polysyndeton, the repeated “and” dragging through each stage of exhaustion until the sudden shift into revelation. The simile “naked as a babe” evokes rebirth, while the alliterative “dazzling, vanished world” gives the closing image an incantatory finish. The passage relies on paradox—an ending that’s also a beginning, a lost world that’s nonetheless present—foreshadowing the characters’ quest for meaning and the fantastical beliefs that unite the community.

“The story was one of many stories the husband had encountered in graduate school, where over the past fourteen years his dissertation topic had drifted—geographically, chronologically, thematically.”

The tricolon “geographically, chronologically, thematically,” set off by a dash, mimics through its cadence the drift it describes, each adverb widening the scope of Miles’s dispersal. The emphasis on “story” and “stories” hints at a man submerged in narrative yet unable to author his own. The passage establishes Miles’s primary internal conflict: a state of perpetual academic aimlessness that defines his character and symbolizes a broader Search for Meaning in the Modern World. The narrator’s dry, understated irony contrasts his lack of professional momentum with his wife’s clear success.