48 pages • 1 hour read
Susanna ClarkePiranesi
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 7: “Matthew Rose Sorensen”
Part 7, Entry 1 Summary: “Valentine Ketterley has disappeared”
The last section returns to the familiar Gregorian calendar, with six entries for the last week of November 2018.
On the 26th of November, the narrator discusses what is known in London about Ketterley: that he purchased the boat and gun which lead most to believe he committed suicide. One police officer, Jamie Askill, questions Sorensen about being Ketterley’s prisoner. The narrator says he was in a house by the sea where he was free to roam. He also confirms his family convinced him to see a psychotherapist for treatment without medication. When Sorensen admits to liking Raphael, Askill tells a story about another case where Raphael gets an arsonist to stop committing crimes even while her “hair was on fire” (236).
Part 7, Entry 2 Summary: “Matthew Rose Sorensen has reappeared”
On the 27th, the narrator describes the labyrinth without revealing its location to friends and family (he provides only a basic description of the house). While still feeling distant from his pre-labyrinth identity, he allows people in London to accept him as Sorensen and tries to fit into that role by cutting his hair and shaving. Sorensen and Piranesi both loved clothes, but this new self (his third) doesn’t; this identity gets rid of many of Sorensen’s old possessions. Sorensen is only known to the narrator through old objects and writing; his memory doesn’t ever fully return. However, he remembers how to function in the modern world, such as restraining Piranesi’s desire to barter instead of buy. The narrator decides to write the book on Arne-Sayles that Sorensen planned to before being captured.
Raphael shows the narrator how to travel in and out of the labyrinth. He finds James Ritter in England and takes him back to the labyrinth. Ritter begs to stay, but the narrator won’t let him, with the caveat that he will bring Ritter if he decides to come back to the labyrinth permanently.
Part 7, Entry 3 Summary: “The body of Valentine Ketterley, magician and scientist”
The following day, the narrator returns to the labyrinth to check on Ketterley’s remains, which are being washed by the tides, tethered to a statue of a half-reclining man until the bones are clean. The narrator reiterates his future plans to arrange the clean bones among the dead.
Part 7, Entry 4 Summary: “Statues again”
On the 29th, the narrator still looks to the statues to enlighten him, like his former labyrinth-bound identity. He associates people with statues: Ketterley, Arne-Sayles, and Raphael all have architectural counterparts in the labyrinth. Raphael admits to visiting the labyrinth without the narrator (as well as with him), and he warns her about disappearing and losing her memory. She still wears the same comforting perfume.
Part 7, Entry 5 Summary: “In my mind are all the tides”
In the entry for the last day of November, the title is the first line (like the very first entry of the novel). While in London, the narrator thinks of the labyrinth and maps out the halls in his mind “when this world becomes too much for me” (243). He dreams of the gorilla statue.
Part 7, Entry 6 Summary: “It began to snow”
On the first day of December, the narrator walks to a cafe in the snow. On the way, he visits a park and people-watches, again comparing people to statues, and watches paper lanterns.
Part 7 Analysis
Upon his return, the people of London who haven’t seen the labyrinth believe it is a figment of Matthew Rose Sorensen’s imagination, likely produced by the trauma of his kidnapping. The House becomes a “description of a mental breakdown seen from the inside” (237). Symbolically, the labyrinth works on both levels—mental and physical—but it is important to note that neither the narrator nor Raphael try to convince Londoners of the labyrinth’s actual existence.
This could be for reputation (so Raphael does not appear insane and Sorensen seems only slightly—manageably—mentally ill) but also for the safety of others who could get lost in the labyrinth. Ritter returns only with the narrator, having already become unstable from his previous time in the labyrinth. Raphael learns how to move between the worlds and teaches the narrator how to as well, but he cautions her to not travel too frequently alone. The narrator can move back and forth only at great cost—the splintering of his personality. For all of the labyrinth’s visitors, a quiet existence seems preferable to changing humanity’s conception of the universe.
The novel’s final images of the statues casts them as archetypal, perhaps representative of Jungian conceptions of the universal symbols that emerge from humanity’s collective subconscious. It also relates to the Clarke’s idea (explored through the novel’s depiction of the labyrinth, journals, statues, etc.) that humanity can be understood through its creations.
Related Titles
By Susanna Clarke
