Flights

Choose one of the fictional vignettes the narrator includes and analyze it in relation to the entire novel. How does it display the novel’s themes? What characteristics of the narrator are present in the characters she writes about?

When the narrator encounters someone speaking Polish during her travels, she pretends not to understand them. Discuss the narrator’s desire for anonymity in relation to her writing practices. How does her desire for anonymity relate to the fragments she chooses to include?

How does the word kairos, as encountered in Kunicki’s vignettes as well as the Hellenic professor’s story, correspond to the narrative structure of Flights? To the vignettes the narrator writes?

What role do travel psychologists have in the novel? How might the narrator’s history as a student of psychology interact with this role?

What attracts the narrator to exhibits of preserved human curiosities? How does her curiosity about preservation techniques interact with her desire for movement and travel?

Discuss the figure of Ruysch in the fictional vignettes of Dr. Blau, Philip Verheyen, and Charlotta. Why do you think the narrator writes of characters surrounding the figure of Ruysch rather than writing a vignette on Ruysch himself?

The narrator’s writing on plastic bags as a new, man-made species is one of the last fragments of the book. Why do you think it appears where it does? What relation do the narrator’s observations on plastic bags have to the preserved organ exhibits that the narrator travels to see?

At a travel psychologist’s airport lecture, the narrator records the psychologist’s description of constellationality as follows: “[I]mpossible to build a consistent cause-and-effect course of argument or a narrative with events that succeed each other casuistically and follow from each other” (77). How does the narrator use this idea of constellationality in her writing?