Dying Inside
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dying Inside is a 1972 "soft" science fiction novel by Robert Silverberg.
The novel's main character, David Selig, is an undistinguished man living in New York City. He was born with a telepathic gift allowing him to read the minds of others and to manipulate people on a psychic level. In his youth, before he learned the true nature of his ability, he called it his 'luck'. Rather than use his superpower for any greater good, however, Selig squanders his gift and uses it only for his own lazy convenience (in one chapter he reads the newspaper through his father's eyes). His power has essentially made him into a lazy bum rather than any kind of superhuman.
As the novel progresses, Selig begins to lose his power and struggles to maintain his grip on reality as his perceptions change and his 'self preservation' ability to get what he wants goes down the drain.
The book has a number of memorable scenes, for instance when David uses his powers to win a fight against a much stronger bully, or when David becomes obsessed with a woman called Kitty from whom he is "blocked" (i.e. he can't read her mind). As an example of his wasted life, David earns a living by reading the minds of plagiarizing college students so that he can better prepare academic papers on their behalf.
One of the most striking features of Dying Inside, which is unusual in a work of fiction, is the constant reference it makes to the names of artists, writers and other academics. This name-dropping, which reflects the narrator's "nerdy" personality, includes (but is not limited to) the following notable individuals:
- Poets: Dante Alighieri, Charles Baudelaire, Robert Browning, Thomas Carew, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, T. S. Eliot, Allen Ginsberg, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Homer, Rudyard Kipling, Comte de Lautréamont, Stéphane Mallarmé, Pindar, Ezra Pound, Arthur Rimbaud, Lord Tennyson, Thomas Traherne, Paul Verlaine, W. B. Yeats
- Painters: Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, M. C. Escher, El Greco, Pablo Picasso, Giovanni Battista Piranesi
- Composers: Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók, Ludwig van Beethoven, Alban Berg, Gustav Mahler, Claudio Monteverdi, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Richard Wagner
- Playwrights: Aeschylus, Samuel Beckett, William Cartwright, Euripides, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Sophocles
- Novelists: Isaac Asimov, Honoré de Balzac, John Barth, Saul Bellow, J. D. Beresford, Ray Bradbury, William S. Burroughs, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Arthur C. Clarke, Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, E. M. Forster, Jean Genet, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Hardy, Robert A. Heinlein, Joseph Heller, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Harper Lee, Norman Mailer, Bernard Malamud, André Malraux, Thomas Mann, George Orwell, Marcel Proust, Thomas Pynchon, Rafael Sabatini, Walter Scott, Olaf Stapledon, Theodore Sturgeon, William Makepeace Thackeray, Mark Twain, John Updike, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, Émile Zola
- Philosophers: Thomas Aquinas, Aristotle, Augustine of Hippo, Simone de Beauvoir, Søren Kierkegaard, Arthur Koestler, Laozi, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Marx, Michel de Montaigne, Bertrand Russell, Henry David Thoreau, Arnold Toynbee
- Scientists and pseudo-scientists: Alfred Adler, William Bates, Edgar Cayce, Sigmund Freud, Josiah Willard Gibbs, Carl Jung, Timothy Leary, Wilhelm Reich, Joseph Banks Rhine, Immanuel Velikovsky Norbert Wiener, Karl Zener
