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Awake and asleep, young people have always dreamed in order to assess and to access their looming lives. Eugene Gant embodies this theme in the early works of Thomas Wolfe, as day and night this exceptional boy struggles through loneliness and stress, in exile, to inhabit the happy land within himself. He dreams of eventually creating immortality as a literary artist. Yet readers can question how much if any of the clarifying dream sequence in the final chapter of both Look Homeward, Angel (1929) and O Lost (2000) Eugene actually remembers when he wakes up the very next day. The opening scene ofWolfe'sOf Time and the River (1935), the Biltmore depot scene, takes place that afternoon, not much over twelve hours after Eugene's spectral, nocturnal reunion and epiphany with Ben on the square. Would Eugene, if he remembers this powerful recent experience, still get on the train and head north to Boston to enter Harvard? Had he not just last night renounced all cities but the "city of myself, upon the continent of my soul" (Angel 625; O Lost 662)?1
These are puzzling questions. Here are others: What did Eugene do before he went to sleep that last night in Altamont? Did he have sex with one of his mother's boarders? Get drunk? Visit Ben's grave? Or did he sleep and dream somewhere in the Dixie - land boardinghouse or nearby? On the square perhaps? In the penultimate chapter of Look Homeward, Angel, Wolfe provides more information than in O Lost about Eugene's last night before heading up North. Leftunanswered in both novels, however, are key questions about his dream of his creative journey into his own world. Where is he going? Why now? When will he get there? In other words, what lies beyond his experience on the square with Ben the previous night? Has Eugene finally discovered the "great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven" or not (Angel 1; O Lost 5)? He has to get away, to go up North, to find out. Wolfe had made a similar journey.
Like three paths gradually merging into a country lane, three motifs in O Lost and Look Homeward, Angel chart Eugene's ambiguous progress toward his dreamed-of artistic destination. The first motif is "a...