Stella Maris

The fourth chapter introduces another of Alicia’s hallucinations—Miss Vivian. This eccentric and melancholic older woman appears as a possible projection of Alicia’s future self, a figure that will never materialize due to her death by suicide. Miss Vivian is depicted as constantly crying, and Alicia explains that she is “unhappy about the babies” (94). This unhappiness represents Alicia’s horror at the nature of the world, where infants cry because they are born into an indifferent world they did not choose.

Alicia emphasizes the significance of faith: as the one indispensable gift in life. Without it, she believes there is nothing. However, Alicia confesses to having lost all sense of faith, particularly in mathematics, which she perceives as an endless array of decisions and questions carried out by the unconscious. She envisions the unconscious as a distant laborer who communicates solely through cryptic metaphors, pictures, and drama—reminiscent of her own hallucinations.

The topic of Suicide and the Dissolution of the Self is introduced by the doctor, shedding light on Alicia’s fetishization of self-annihilation. Alicia delves into how the fascination with death first entered her consciousness through a nightmare. In this dream, she peered through “a Judas hole” (an archaic term for a peephole in a door) into a realm where sentinels stood at a gate, and “beyond the gate was something terrible that had power over me” (105). She does not articulate what that terrible thing is; it is by definition beyond the power of language to explain or analyze, but she equates it, tentatively, with her suicidal thoughts. She names this force “The Archatron” and speculates that the Kid, her hallucination, serves the role of restraining this death wish. Alicia traces her thoughts of suicide to a fundamental belief in the inherent horror of life, exacerbated by her father’s pivotal role in the detonation of the first atomic bombs. This is why she views death as a means of ending misery and suffering and escaping the indifference of the world.

Alicia views the Kid’s thought process as a diversion from her underlying desire for death, a theory she defends by referring to the psychoanalyst Carl “Jung, who “tells of a case that suggests that aberrant mental states may not be in themselves an illness but rather a protection against a greater one” (155). In her hallucinations, the Kid engages in heated debates with her, endeavors to amuse her with a troupe of other bizarre figures, and possibly strives to rescue her from her own struggles. In this role, the Kid bears similarities to Alicia’s older brother, embodying an intellectual flexibility and an attachment to the material world that he wishes to instill in Alicia.

Alicia once again reflects on the nature of the unconscious, drawing directly from McCarthy’s essay on the Kekulé problem. She characterizes the unconscious not as a supernatural or magical entity, as commonly imagined, but rather as purely biological—“machine for operating an animal” (129). Alicia rejects the notion of a cohesive, singular self, dismissing it as an illusion. Instead, she envisions multiple, conflicting selves, mirroring her fragmented hallucinations that contend and interact with each other. This multiplicity reflects the inherent randomness of the world, where each facet remains unaware of how they function, as understanding would jeopardize the integrity of the entire system.

Alicia persistently contends that mathematical knowledge is inherently abstract. She asserts that the genesis of modern civilization occurred when an ancient individual discovered the concept that “one thing can be another thing” (134). This profound realization paved the way for the development of art, mathematics, language, and numerous other inventions that shape human life, society, and culture. Ironically, it is this very knowledge that prompts Alicia to seriously contemplate death by suicide. Her elaborate imagination allows her to think of all the trauma involved in drowning at the bottom of a lake, but the level of description disguises her sense of pleasure and desire for annihilation. Yet for her, the perfect demise is to slip into obscurity, illustrated in her envisioned scenario of ingesting pills while adrift in a dinghy in the ocean. She imagines peacefully drifting into sleep just before the dinghy deflates, allowing her to descend to the ocean’s depths unnoticed.