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Part 2
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Piranesi, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Human vs. Inhuman Worlds
Science and the Pursuit of Knowledge
Memory and Identity
Friendship, Betrayal, and Loyalty
Summary
Analysis
A few weeks later, Piranesi approaches an old man. Piranesi asks if he is 16, but the man is confused. Piranesi explains his numbering system, listing the dead people, like the biscuit box man. The man claims the biscuit box man used to live in his study and speculates that the skeletons are Stanley Ovenden and an Italian person he was visiting “here.” He explains he is only passing through to see what had happened to Piranesi. He asks if the other living person—i.e., the Other—is Val Ketterley. Piranesi confirms this, and the man explains that Val used to be his student, but that he never had any original ideas. According to the man, he himself discovered this place.
Piranesi meets a new stranger who seems to possess a great deal of information about the House. Not only does he know the Other, referring to him as Val Ketterley, but also he claims to know the identities of the dead, speculating about their identities as though they were people he knew. Most spectacularly, he reveals himself as the original discoverer of this world, reinforcing the idea that the House is not be the only world. Though these are all potentially ground-shaking discoveries, Piranesi’s remains surprisingly unperturbed.
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Themes
The man claims he paid a great price for his discovery: prison. He then tells Piranesi how “this world was made,” claiming that, in his youth, he realized that the wisdom of the ancients—allowing men to fly, etc.— had been lost, but that it could not have vanished. He speculated other worlds must exist, eventually finding this one, a Distributary World created by “ideas flowing out of another world.” Piranesi listens, wondering who this man is. He does not fit 16’s description, so Piranesi reasons he must be someone else. The man asks Piranesi if Ketterley still believes the ancients’ wisdom is here. Piranesi says yes, but that he personally does not.
If true, the man’s story of his discovery of the House has profound implications for Piranesi. Were the world truly a “Distributary World” discovered by this man, this would mean that Piranesi is not an native inhabitant as he believes, but rather a transplant from another world. This hypothesis would explain many of the strange occurrences events surrounding Piranesi, such as his knowledge of words like “tree” that do not have tangible referents in the House.
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The man applauds Piranesi’s intelligence, explaining that the ancient wisdom is long gone. Piranesi asks if the statues represent the “Ideas and Knowledge” flowing out from the other world. The man says he believes so, speculating that statues of computers may be emerging somewhere in the labyrinth right now. The man then says he cannot stay long, as there are side-effects of doing so, like amnesia and mental collapse. However, he observes that Piranesi is surprisingly coherent, despite others who have gone insane after spending only a fraction of the time here. He tells Piranesi that someone is searching for him. Piranesi asks if it is 16, which the man confirms uncertainly.
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Piranesi says the Other claimed 16 was after him, not Piranesi. The man says denies this, claiming Ketterley is an egoist. The man hates Ketterley and plans on providing 16 directions to get here. Piranesi begs him not to, but the man insists; however, he explains that 16 may never arrive. Not everyone, apparently, can find this place; only Sylvia D’Agostino was able to get here without instructions. He explains that the closer 16 gets, the more nervous Ketterley will become. Piranesi wishes him luck on his journey. The man reflects that while he once thought of Piranesi as an “arrogant little shit”—back when he refused Piranesi’s written request to see him—he is now “charming.”
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Piranesi writes down his experience. He names the man “The Prophet,” since he explained the creation of the world. Piranesi tries to interpret the Prophet’s various claims, like his claim that he is not 16 and that he sent others here. Piranesi wonders if the Prophet is from a distant location in the House where there are more people. He reflects on the revelation of four of the skeletons’ names and expresses pleasure at the Prophet’s affirmation that the Other’s pursuit of knowledge is senseless. He wonders why the Other has never mentioned the Prophet, since they clearly know each other. He is baffled by the Prophet’s claim that Piranesi ever sent him a letter; he just met him, after all.
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Several days later, Piranesi meets the Other. He wants to tell him about the Prophet, but the Other interrupts before he can. He tells Piranesi that 16 is actually looking for Piranesi, and that 16 will tell him horrible things that will drive him mad. The Other explains that if 16 speaks to Piranesi, Piranesi could turn against the Other and the Other would be forced to kill him. Piranesi promises to stay away from 16, but he says nothing else. The next day, Piranesi is glad he did not tell the Other about meeting the Prophet; after all, Piranesi approached him because he thought he was 16. Piranesi thinks if the roles were reversed, he would not consider killing the Other.
Piranesi practices hiding from 16, noting how his faded clothing makes for good camouflage amid the statues. The next day, he indexes his journals for the past two weeks. To his surprise, he discovers not only that an entry for Stanley Ovenden already exists, but it’s from Journal no. 21—a journal that does not exist; he is only on 9. He finds other indexed subjects that are equally vexing, like “Outsider psychiatry,” that similarly reference non-existent journals. The writing is different too—younger. Inspecting his journals, Piranesi realizes that Journals 1, 2, and 3 had had the number 2 crossed out, meaning they used to be 21, 22, and 23.
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Piranesi finds the journal entry on Stanley Ovenden. It is a biography, and it describes a group of students gathering under the tutelage of Laurence Arne-Sayles in 1987 in Perugia. The favorite students are Ovenden, Bannerman, Hughes, Ketterley, and D’Agostino. In the narrative, tensions appear in the group, a product of Laurence’s divisive disposition. Ovenden and Hughes are increasingly ostracized and befriend Maurizio Giussani. This alarms Arne-Sayles, and several days later, Maurizio goes missing. Ten years later Arne-Sayles is convicted of kidnapping and the Italian police reopen the case. Piranesi stops reading, horrified. He realizes he has forgotten things after all. He flings away his journal and seeks comfort in the arms of the Faun Statue.
To feel better, Piranesi visits his favorite statues the next day. Thinking more calmly, he concludes he must have been ill in the past when he wrote those entries. However, the information in the journal is not all nonsense. Some of the words seem to evoke sensory memories, and some of the names are found elsewhere in the House, like Laurence’s note. Piranesi decides to focus on his health to guard against the return of the illness that made him mad. He also wants to study his journals to discover what he forget and to learn about his own madness. Given what the Other and Prophet have said about the House, Piranesi wonders whether he trusts it. He decides he does, trusting in its ways.
A week and a half later, Piranesi reads about Sylvia D’Agostino. Born in Scotland, she studied mathematics at the University of Manchester but switched to anthropology after hearing Arne-Sayles lectures on ancient minds. She soon began living with and caring for Arne-Sayles as an unpaid secretary and housekeeper. He eventually demanded she cut off ties with her family. She made movies, one of which was titled The Castle and featured a vast landscape of different castles, supposedly a record of one of Arne-Sayles’s worlds, as described in his book, The Labyrinth (2000). In 1990 she struck up a friendship with Robert Allstead at her work. Arne-Sayles was jealous and demanded she leave her job. Sylvia refused and was never seen again.
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Themes
Piranesi reads from two journal entries for James Ritter. The first recounts the arrest of Arne-Sayles after a housecleaner discovers a secret room hiding a sick, imprisoned man —James Ritter. The entry describes Ritter in his youth as attractive but troubled. After being recovered from Arne-Sayles’s house, Ritter is initially unable to describe what happened. When he does, he describes spending time in a house with statues and halls and often seems to believe he is still there. Some theorize that Ritter brainwashed him to support his claims of other worlds, while others claim the kidnapping was sexually motivated. He works at the Manchester Town Hall, which reminds him of the other house. He refuses an interview with journalist Angharad Scott.
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Piranesi is intrigued by Ritter’s journal entry, particularly the part about the Hall of Minotaurs—a clear reference to the First Vestibule. Sylvia’s movie The Castle also seems to correspond to the Halls. Piranesi reflects there are words he knows that do not exist in the House, like a garden, but reasons that such words are deduced from the different statues around the House. Counting the new names, Piranesi realizes there are 15 of them, and that if you exclude the Other and the Prophet, there are 13. This is the same number as the dead, but Piranesi thinks this could be a coincidence. There are more people in the journals, they are just unnamed.
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