[spoilers] Lucas and his tattoos

[binkie]

(15-12-2010 03:20 AM)Byatil Wrote:  Just to briefly return to the point about Katchimov being Lucas' "only company", it's also interesting that when he meets Elizabeta in the park, he tells her "8 years... all I thought about was you". Seems he has a habit of telling these little white lies!

Admittedly, not related to the tattoos, but onward nevertheless...


I'm curious as to why you characterise this as a lie.

I have always thought this line was a very clever device by which to introduce the crisis of self-awareness that is Lucas' state of mind following his release from prison. He tries so hard to keep the operative reality separate from the emotional fallout (as when he answers Harry's enquiry in 7.1 as to how he was treated in prison "Sometimes well; sometimes not"). On occasion, however, these two states of awareness and denial crash dramatically against one another. I think that is what is happening here.

I suspect the version of Elisabeta which sustained Lucas in prison was a highly idealised one. He would have needed to maintain a vision of something entirely apart from, and entirely unaffected and untainted by, his surroundings and his circumstance and his experience of prison. As soon as he sees Elisabeta in the park, picking up her child, that vision of an unchanged (and unchanging) perfection - familiar from eight years of constant reference - is exposed as an illusion. This is only reinforced, and quite brutally, when she approaches him in the cemetery and reveals herself as his FSB handler. Not only are awareness and denial colliding, but the desperate need to keep separate the things which sustain, and the things which sully, emotional survival is being challenged by the revelation that, in fact, they are one and the same.

In saying to Elisabeta that he has spent eight years thinking of her, Lucas is beginning to admit to himself - even as he speaks aloud - a very unpleasant truth. He wants someone to acknowledge that he has suffered, and that he was abandoned to that suffering. He does not want to take responsibility for making others feel less awkward in his company. The words spoken to Elisabeta are, I think, an indication of the extent to which Lucas is floundering in his recently-restored freedom. He is no longer in a contained environment, where his emotional connections and personal interactions are strictly controlled (whether by fear, indifference, or self-preservation). He is back in the world, where emotional reality is more vivid and more tangible. Lucas, it seems to me, is not lying so much as he is confused and confonted by the suddenly apparent complexity of the relationship between himself and his experience, and between the world he is in and the one he has left. There is a sense in which he seems almost to expect Elisabeta to know that he has been thinking of her - he is not telling her, he is reminding her -and he is surpised and disappointed that she is oblivious to this.

You argue that Lucas tells Elisabeta a conscious untruth. I wonder why that is, and I wonder why what he says suggests itself to you as untrue. I always appreciate additional insight, and I am interested to know if I am alone in seeing this as anything other than outright deceit.