Andrew Brown makes some good points. I withdraw my statement that it was presumably because of "embarrassment" that the son was deposited in the sanatorium. Nevertheless, the father does imply that he is going to have to justify to "the Prince" removing his son from the santorium .

The couple have a two-roomed flat with only one bedroom, but it is evidently expensive to keep their son in the sanatorium. The implication is that, although the money for the sanatorium might have been used to rent a two-bedroomed flat, the couple has had no expectation, perhaps for four years, that the son will ever return home. How is the son supposed to feel about that? Or are we simply supposed to take it, as we have to according to Mr Brown, because we must treat the narrator as "omniscient", that the son has no "desires" in this matter?

If the narrator told us the earth was flat, would we have to accept that? If the narrator started spouting Freudian jargon would we have to accept that? We would surely take it that there was a tension between author and narrator, if the author were VN. Why should we accept, just because it is poetically presented, the jargon of clinical psychiatric generalisation, medicalisation, reification, dehumanisation, and hopelessness? Or is it the case that VN saw through psychoanalysis but did not see through the far worse insult to human dignity that is presented by clinical psychiatry?

Anthony Stadlen