The City and Its Uncertain Walls

The City and Its Uncertain Walls is a novel that swings between different worlds and realities. The line between reality and imagination is blurred, as the novel explores how each informs the other. The characters, and particularly the protagonist, must confront the possibility that multiple worlds exist and must struggle to determine which world they occupy at any given time.

For the protagonist, who spends extended time both in reality and in the illusory walled-in town, the divide between the material world and that of imagination is often muddled. He finds himself drawn from one world to the other, most often through his senses. In the library in reality, the smell of apple-wood smoke poses a particular challenge to him, as it reminds him of the apple trees outside the walled-in town: “But along with the pleasant smell, there was an element of danger. Because that fragrance, before I knew it, seemed to draw me deeper into a dream world. There was a sense of being pulled into a world without a framework” (187). A similar smell is enough to blur the lines of reality and pull the protagonist into another world. Though he is not physically transported there, the protagonist’s mind must grapple with differences between reality and imagination.

Though he knows two distinct worlds, the protagonist cannot help but think of both when similar sights, smells, and experiences exist in both worlds. He trusts his memory to help him distinguish his experiences in either world, but when an experience is shared between the two worlds, imagination and reality begin to mix. This slippage between real and imagined worlds serves as an allegory for the experience of human consciousness—in which the objective, material world is always filtered through the individual’s memory and imagination so that it becomes difficult or impossible to draw a clear distinction between what is objectively real and what is subjectively perceived.

The protagonist’s struggles with differentiating between reality and imagination continue throughout the novel, and worsen when reminders of the walled-in town appear. When M** makes a map for the protagonist, showing the town and its many features, the protagonist pictures the town, reliving his experiences and feeling the very real memories. Though the walled-in town does not abide by the rules of material reality—as time there does not pass and no one dies—the protagonist’s experiences there are real. The reality of the town makes the protagonist’s memories of it equal to those of his actual reality. As he considers the map, these memories lead him to doubt reality: “For four days, alone in my room, with the map before me, I wandered in that world that isn’t here, caught up so deeply in that visual hallucination machine (type of thing) I gradually couldn’t tell which world I belonged to” (291). The ambiguous, hedging language here—especially the parenthetical “(type of thing)” suggests the degree to which concrete language is unable to capture the protagonist’s experience of the walled-in town. The problem is not that this world is unreal, but that its relation to reality is undefinable. As the protagonist considers the map, the images and memories that it evokes become real, reflecting his time in the town. He has lived experience in two realities, and though the walled-in town exists only in his consciousness, he knows it is real. Both are equally valid and meaningful realities, and as they confront each other in his mind, he becomes unsure of which he should be tethered to. The more reality and illusion interact, the less confident the protagonist is in himself.