Jerzy Kosinski's Steps: The Vanishing Staircase

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2014-01-15

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University of Hawaii at Manoa

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On first reading Jerzy Kosinski's Steps the reader encounters what seems to be a series of unrelated incidents. Several critics have suggested reasons for the book's fragmentary structure. Robert Boyer sees it as a montage of violence depicting ''the black flag of our condition."1 To Boyer, the book's fragmentary structure represents a gratuitous, chaotic existence which "makes no sense, but is ours to make sense of." To Samuel Coale, the book's fragmentary incidents presents us with "pictures" of a self which tries and fails to define itself as the sum of its actions:2 The tension exists between man's life as a series of disconnected events and man's attempt to find some kind of meaning that may possibly connect them. He cannot: the quest returns to the reality of the disconnected events themselves and no valid connection is ever made (pp. 364-5).

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38 pages

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