A woman named Lanya, who becomes his lover, confronts him at one point with the fact that he has been missing for five days, yet he experienced that period as a single day. The Kid reveals early on that has spent time in a mental hospital, and he worries that he might be losing his mind again in Bellona. In the last section of the novel, he interrupts narration of apparently real scenes of increasing violence and destruction with a running commentary on the limits of language to capture what is happening. He uses it to record his thoughts at times and also to draft poems. The Kid finds a notebook with half its pages blank, but we are not sure if the book is new to him or if he had written the entries himself and simply forgotten. That is a driving theme through most of Dhalgren. Much later, we hear the Kid relating this as a dream, but he is not sure if it was a dream or real. She is turning into a tree right before his eyes.
By the time he gets out of the cave, the woman has disappeared, but he finds her in a meadow beside the road he is taking to the broken city of Bellona. She guides him to a cave where he finds a long chain beset with prisms and opaque glass that he wraps around his body. In the long country, cut with rain, somehow there is nowhere to begin.” Kindle Edition, Rather, it continually fragments on the terrible and vivid ephemera of now. Though he’s forgotten his name, he recalls many fragments of his life.
The strange woman has sex with him, draws out a bit of his background. He doesn’t know his purpose, other than to survive each moment with his consciousness intact. In a lyrical, almost incantatory opening section, a nameless young man meets a shadowy woman who asks him where he is going.
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