Suspended Dreams
It’s called Dream Story because Fridolin lives in a dreamy trance: a suspended state where he floats through Viennese streets feebly grounding himself in worldly affairs. He shrinks inwards during critical conjunctions, simultaneously reproaching and justifying himself. Nobody forces Fridolin, but we sense he’s profoundly unfree, tangled in a self-subjugated worldly suspension.
Fridolin first suspends himself when stumbling upon a homeless man. He thinks, “What if I woke him up and gave him money for a shelter for the night?” Then he immediately undermines himself, unravelling his train of thought. “What good would that do,” Fridolin questions. “Then I would have to get him shelter for tomorrow night too, otherwise there would really be no point, and in the end I might be suspected of having criminal relations with him.”
So he leaves, attempting to “escape as rapidly as possible from all responsibility and temptation,” considering also the thousand other homeless people remaining in poverty despite his potential help. We sense a fundamental disconnect between Fridolin’s socially conditioned instincts of mild revulsion and self-interest, of not wanting to be associated with such people, and his genuine instincts: a weak, musing, nevertheless sympathetic altruism. He walks on.
Next, Fridolin tramps past a group of drunk frat boys. One boy bumps into him purposefully, and as Fridolin continues forward, he hears laughter from behind. Again, he’s thrust into an opportunity—to confront, to speak, to act!
How does he respond? He withdraws, self-suspending again.
Fridolin ruminates viscerally at breakneck speed. His heart beats faster, his knees shake, and he displays every possible anxiety symptom. He wonders if he’s a coward and comforts himself with his ability to follow social conventions: that is, practicing medicine, having a child and wife, etc. When he briefly considers a confrontation, his courage fails. He could cut his arm, lose an eye, contract blood poisoning—or die! What if he can’t show up to work? What then?
For the second time, Fridolin refuses to engage with the world. He walks on.
Finally, he stumbles across an opportunity he can’t miss. A young prostitute, Mizzi, beckons him into her room; he follows her meekly, though he doesn’t even process his movement. Fridolin finds himself “suddenly standing next to her,” with no mention of any walking or physical motion from in between. He wonders wretchedly if this situation would’ve been possible “an hour, even ten minutes ago.” We realize Fridolin has tangled himself into a web of compliance and confusion (which haunts him later in his erotic escapades) and can only lament, “Why?!”
Of course, he can’t find the answers. And I doubt anyone like Fridolin can: Mizzi quips that “in this district, they’re all doctors, aren’t they?”
Which strongly implies Fridolin isn’t alone. There are thousands of similarly suspended men like him, of identical breeding and background: the medical, married, and miserable, living a shrunken, self-isolating existence. Like Fridolin, they shield their eyes, with their sweaty palms, from the beating furor of the world.
