The news of Irimiás’s supposed resurrection exposes the deep desperation of the estate’s residents, whose individual hopes and anxieties coalesce around his mythic figure. Upon hearing of his return, Mrs. Schmidt is immediately consumed by fantasies of escape, imagining a new life of “soft furs cool to the touch, brilliantly lit hotels, lavish breakfasts, grand shopping trips and nights” (104). She longs for more than just Irimiás himself. She longs for what he represents, namely a deliverance from her squalid reality. Similarly, the landlord is less concerned about the miracle of a man returning from the dead than he is about the practical matter of a financial debt. Futaki, meanwhile, sees Irimiás as the only force capable of restoring order. This collective projection demonstrates how the theme of Desperation as Fertile Ground for False Prophets operates; Irimiás becomes a blank canvas onto which the community paints its disparate, unrealizable desires for escape, money, and organization. Their immediate and unquestioning belief in his return, despite its impossibility, highlights the psychological void left by the collapse of their social and economic world. In the context of late-stage Hungarian communism, where state-sponsored utopian promises have failed, the villagers’ turn toward a charismatic, quasi-messianic figure reflects a broader societal yearning for meaning and salvation in an ideological vacuum, as well as the poverty of imagination caused by years of decline. The only salvation they can imagine, the novel suggests, comes from a miraculous outsider rather than from themselves.

The narrative’s switch into Esti Horgos’s perspective in Chapter 5 functions as a destructive microcosm of the community’s moral and psychological decay. Desperate to earn the respect of her cruel brother, Sanyi, Esti traps and terrorizes the family cat, Micur, in a misguided attempt to prove her own strength. Her internal logic, shaped by Sanyi’s predatory worldview, convinces her that she must win a battle to be worthy. Rather than a product of innate evil, the violent act is a tragic performance of the only value system she knows—one where power and dominance are the sole measures of worth. When Sanyi later mocks her for believing in his “money tree” scam, he articulates the cynical philosophy that has corrupted her: “People here make a mess of everything, it’s one mess after another, but we know how to straighten things out, don’t we, retard?” (119). Esti’s subsequent murder-suicide is the horrifying conclusion of this lesson. Having been systematically stripped of hope by her family and community, she enacts a final, terrible assertion of control; her belief in “guardian angels” is a pathetic echo of the community’s own faith in a false savior. Her story shows how the community’s larger state of decay poisons its most vulnerable members, perpetuating a cycle of abuse and despair.

Framed by the chapter titles “The Work of the Spider I” and “The Work of the Spider II” (79, 135), this section uses the recurring motif of spiders and webs to symbolize the inescapable nature of the villagers’ entrapment. The landlord’s futile, ongoing battle against the cobwebs in his bar mirrors the residents’ own inability to escape their stagnant existence. The motif culminates in the final moments of Chapter 6 as the drunken villagers lie unconscious and spiders emerge to cover them, their belongings, and the entire room in a fine, complex network of thin cobwebs. The prose describes this work with an almost scientific precision, noting how every object is connected so that the spiders “should be properly advised of every slight tremor, each microscopic shift” (160). This image powerfully visualizes the theme of Decay as an Unstoppable Force. The web is an organic extension of the environment, woven from the residents’ own inertia, alcohol use, and false hopes. When Irimiás and Petrina finally arrive, they find their targets already immobilized, cocooned in a web of their own making. Krasznahorkai’s long, labyrinthine sentences trap the reader in a continuous flow of description that formally mirrors this sense of entanglement, making the experience of reading itself an act of being caught in a textual web.

The wild, chaotic party that erupts just before dawn is a grotesque parody of celebration, embodying the futility inherent in the motif of the tango dance structure. Spurred on by Mrs. Kráner’s demand for music, the villagers throw themselves into a desperate, drunken frenzy. The chapter numbers count up to six, mimicking the steps of the dance. The dance and the chapter numbers reach a zenith as the villagers dance themselves into delusion and delirium before news of Esti’s death and their removal of the town counts back down to reality. Halics’s comical dance with the much larger Mrs. Kráner and the headmaster’s lustful tango with Mrs. Schmidt are expressions of frantic, last-ditch hedonism. The dance is a forward movement that leads only to collapse, as one by one the participants succumb to exhaustion and pass out. This sequence mirrors the steps of a tango, in which every advance is countered by a retreat. The villagers’ brief explosion of energy resolves into a deeper stupor, reinforcing The Cyclical Nature of History and Suffering by showing that any attempt to break from their static misery only returns them to it more forcefully. The party is less a celebration of Irimiás’s impending arrival than a final, convulsive dance before the end, the titular satantango that exhausts all remaining vitality and leaves the community entirely passive and vulnerable for its new leader.