Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: Exit
As does Alice’s participation in the trial and her confrontation with the queen, so does Joseph’s confrontation with the dog-man drive him out of the world of the sanatorium, though not out of the dream entirely. After leaving the dog-man alone in his father’s bedroom, he tells:
I went out and walked slowly along the corridor, then downstairs and across the hall leading to the entrance door; I pause at the gate, strode across the courtyard, banged the iron gate shut, and only then began to run, breathlessly, my heart thumping, my temples throbbing, along the dark avenue leading to the railway station.
Images raced through my head, each more horrible than the next. The impatience of the monster dog; his fear and despair when he realized that I had cheated him; another attack of fury, another burst of rage breaking out with unchecked force. My father’s return to the Sanatorium, his unsuspecting knock at the door, and his confrontation with the terrible beast.
The emotional escalation is rapid here and threatens to overcome Joseph. He is frightened and desperate – and wildly full of guilt for what he has done to his father and for his failure to properly care for him. The emotional escalation has provoked a response motivated by self-preservation – an attempt to escape the world of the sanatorium entirely. It also provides Joseph, for the first time, with the ability to question the reality of the sanatorium’s realm in a similar way to how Alice questions the domain of the Queen of Hearts when she states that they are nothing but a pack of cards. Joseph comforts himself with the following thought:
Luckily, in fact, Father was no longer alive; he could not really be reached, I thought with relief, and saw in front of me the black row of railway carriages ready to depart…. Farewell, Father, Farewell town that I shall never see again.
Joseph, however, never makes it out of the dream – just as we never experience him entering it. The end of the story finds him in the same space as the beginning – on the train. This time, however, he is not heading in one particular direction or toward a specific destination or goal. Rather, he has become a permanent resident of the realm of the train – the transition between dream and wakefulness, between life and death – bending to its bizarre logic. As such, the story might represent a denial of such strict separations as we see in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The connection between realms and states of consciousness in Schulz’s story might more closely parallel journeys into the underworld described by Virgil or Dante – though a journey that sees the explorer of the realms of darkness never fully return. Schulz closes the story with Joseph seemingly forever stuck between life and death, being asleep and being awake. Since leaving the sanatorium, Joseph says:
I have traveled continuously. I have made my home in that train, and everybody puts up with me as I wander from coach to coach. The compartments, enormous as rooms, are full of rubbish and straw, and cold drafts pierce them on gray, colorless days.
My suit became torn and ragged. I have been given the shabby uniform of a railwayman. My face is bandaged with a dirty rag, because one of my cheeks is swollen. I sit on the straw, dozing, and when hungry, I stand in the corridor outside the second-class compartment and sing. People throw small coins into my hat: a black railwayman’s hat, its visor half torn away.
Is Schulz saying there is no exit from dream space? Does this inability stem from the tight bond between dreams and individual consciousness and the impossibility of escaping the fears and anxieties that, because of it, animate both dreaming and waking life?
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