58 pages • 1 hour read
Intermezzo
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Symbols & Motifs
Chess
Chess is a prominent motif in the novel, providing the backdrop for Ivan’s narrative as he struggles through a dry period in his career as a chess player. Chess offers a contrast to a social world whose rules remain amorphous and elusive. Where Ivan has spent most of his early life learning the strict rules of chess, he is now forced to spend his adult life learning the equally daunting, but much less defined, ruleset of interpersonal relationships.
Consequently, this motif allows the reader to see each interpersonal relationship as a power game where each party competes to gain the upper hand. Peter drives the importance of maintaining dominance in his dynamic with Naomi while always falling back in his relationship with Sylvia. During a key confrontation between Peter and Ivan, they argue over Peter’s status as the older brother and how much he values proving Ivan wrong.
When Ivan is considering early retirement from chess, he reminds himself how much he yearns to play a beautiful chess game again. Symbolically, this resonates with his relationship with Margaret, which allows Ivan the freedom not to fit the social rules that govern his engagement with, for example, Peter and Sylvia. Ivan only wants to give Margaret what he needs, allowing him to see the beauty of her character, as well as the resulting beauty of their encounters with one another.
The Green Hat Problem
The green hat problem is a recurring motif in the novel, driving The Limits of Language as a theme. In the problem, the statement “All my hats are green” (262) is an ambiguous lie. When Sylvia first raises the paradox to Peter in Chapter 5, she stresses that the dilemma resides in the precise nature of the lie: Either the liar has some hats that are green or the liar has no hats. Ivan helps Sylvia to resolve the problem by framing the statement as a conditional. However, this raises another problem, which considers the falsehood of particulars. By referring to a single hat, the statement ceases to be a conditional because it fulfills the logical structure of a definite description.
Ivan and Sylvia conclude that this problem merely reveals the incongruence between formal logic and common sense. By forcing language to fit onto reality, one arrives at “truths” that make less sense than the mere observation of reality might suggest. This speaks to the relationship Ivan and Peter have with one another, where they clearly feel concern and pity for one another, even as they fail to respect one another.
The green hat problem also exposes the contradictions of Peter’s relationships with the women in his life. He understands that he loves them both, but cannot reconcile the truth of his devotion to each of them without invalidating the other based on his understanding of how to define his romantic life. When the novel ends, Peter, Ivan, and Margaret decide it is better to live on to see whether the experiments of their respective relationships work, rather than to conclude its failure on mere speculation. Living this way, they allow reality to lead language.
Alexei
Alexei the dog symbolizes The Frailty of the Material World. Alexei is a reminder of the innocent, joyful life that Ivan has lost with the death of his father.
When Ivan tells Margaret about Alexei, he shows her a video and discovers that his late father appears in it at the end. In this way, Alexei is an extension of Ivan’s father, driving Ivan’s need to care for the dog even as the world turns increasingly hostile to its existence. As a dog, Alexei is ignorant of the temporality of the world, living happily in Ivan’s company in the present. Meanwhile, Ivan dreads losing Alexei, whether through rehousing or death, because the pain of losing his father is still fresh.
After Ivan meets Naomi and realizes that Peter is failing to cope with the loss of their father, he retreats to his room and embraces Alexei, hinting at his wish to return to a lost time.
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