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On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in If on a winter’s night a traveler, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Act of Reading
Academia and Publishing
Censorship and Government Oppression
Love, Lust, and Anxiety
Summary
Analysis
Your plane lands before you can finish On the carpet of leaves illuminated by the moon. While you’re going through airport security, someone confiscates your book, saying it’s banned in Ataguitania. In the airport, however, you meet a fellow traveler, a woman named Corinna who looks a lot like Lotaria, and she tells you she has her own copy of the book she can lend you at some point. But when you look at Corinna’s book, you see it’s actually Around an empty grave by Calixto Bandera. She explains it’s just a fake dust jacket.
In Chapter 8, Flannery said he would send the Reader to South America and maybe send Ludmilla’s sister, as well, to keep the Reader busy. This passage seems to confirm that Flannery got his wish, although the confusion over whether Corinna is really Ludmilla adds some ambiguity. While several of the story fragments have dealt with the theme of government oppression, the airport security staff confiscating books shows how oppression is beginning to creep into the frame story.
Active
Themes
You tell Corinna that if the book’s dust jacket is a fake, the text is probably fake too. She admits that falsifications can be hard to stop—in Ataguitania, everything can be faked. All of sudden, while Corinna and you are waiting for a taxi, some police officers arrest the two of you. Corinna remains calm, claiming that she is Gertrude and that the cops need to take her to their headquarters at once. You are amazed, and so Corinna tells you that these cops are fake too.
Although Marana is initially nowhere to be found in Ataguitania (a fictional country), his presence seems to be everywhere, embodied by all the fakes. The Reader struggles to maintain any grasp on reality as Corinna turns out to possibly be someone else. Although Ataguitania takes things to the extreme, it represents how even in real-world countries the truth can be a difficult concept to pin down.
Active
Themes
You end up in a station, where Corinna gives her name as Ingrid. Eventually, Corinna gets separated from you, and when she comes back, she’s in uniform and another officer calls her Alfonsina. Corinna explains that there’s a complicated situation of revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries in the country, and you may be taken to prison, but it will be a fake prison.
Active
Themes
Corinna claims to be a real revolutionary infiltrating the ranks of false revolutionaries. You still worry about going to prison, but Corinna assures you it’s a good prison with a library. In addition, a prison can be the best place to find banned books. Your quest to come to Ataguitania to find a counterfeiter seems to be derailed. You wonder to yourself if Corinna is actually Lotaria or if she’s just someone who fills a similar role in the story.
Active
Themes
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In prison, you make a complaint at the library about the book Around an empty grave by Calixto Bandera. The man at the desk says he’d like to perform a test to compare your impressions of the book to the results of a computer. He calls for the programmer, Sheila, and Corinna comes out, answering to yet another name.
Active
Themes
While Corinna (as Sheila) is helping to set up the reading experiment, you grab her by the wrist and accuse her of being Lotaria. She claims that she doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. You accuse her whole revolution of just reproducing old forms of power, saying that whenever she takes off her uniform, there’s always another uniform underneath.
Corinna seems to challenge you, so you rip off her clothes, seeing under the outfit of Sheila the outfits of Alfonsina, Ingrid, and Gertrude, until at last you just see a naked body. She asks if her body is a uniform and then asserts that in fact it is. She begins undressing you. The narrator asks you what right you have to start getting naked with Corinna/Lotaria—wasn’t Ludmilla enough for you?
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Themes
Just then someone takes a photo, and a photographer accuses Captain Alexandra—Corinna—of attempting to have sex with a prisoner again. You and Corinna get up and compose yourselves, returning to the experiment. You get the sense that Corinna is nervous and that somehow the text by Calixto Bandera that she’s trying to pull up on the computer has gotten scrambled.
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