Chance

I was completely captivated and enthralled by the first chapter of Ghostwritten.  Each page was more exciting than the last and I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat.  I couldn't wait to find out what the crazy Quasar's motives were and to meet the "Almighty Serendipity."  The complex relationship between the Quasar and His Serendipity both annoyed and fascinated me.  The intricate web of lives the Quasar wove in order to keep his identity and intentions secret were not only amazing, but done in a fashion that appeared to be a second nature to him.  Needless to say again, I found myself truly enraptured--although a bit disturbed--by the storyline.  So you can imagine my shock and total disappointment when the succeeding chapters did not answer the countless questions aroused by the first!  It took an incredibly amount of patience and detective work on my behalf in order to unearth the connections between each chapter and character which I honestly found, quite aggravating.  Don't get me wrong, I am up for and enjoy a good challenge, but to me, the connections were convoluted and hidden almost too well.  Once I was able to get over my initial anger toward Mitchell, I shifted my focus to appreciating his clever and unique style of writing.  When I did this, I began to discover countless similar threads, aside from just the relationships between the characters, in each chapter.  One particular recurring concept that I found interesting and worth mentioning is that of chance.

Although it is not most obviously referenced until the "London" chapter, chance first appears in the name of the mysterious "Serendipity" in the very first chapter.  By definition, "serendipity" refers to something that occurs by happenstance, luck, coincidence, or by some sort of fluke.  It is different than saying something is or was fated or destined to be.  Chance continues to be a hidden theme in the "Tokyo" chapter when Satoru goes back inside the record store to answer a phone call against his first impulse.  It is by pure chance that the phone rang at that exact instant and by that chance he meets his love, Tomoyo.  Satoru even refers to the chance of such an incident happening at that exact moment when he states, "I've thought about it many times since:  if that phone hadn't rung at that moment, and if I hadn't taken the decision to go back and answer it, then everything that happened afterwards wouldn't have happened" (53).

By chance, Neal Brose drops dead of diabetes at an extremely unfortunate and coincidental moment.  By chance, the old woman happened to come across General Brain in a paradoxical moment.  By chance, the noncorpum located his lost memory of origin.  By chance, Margarita finds herself in the hands of the police.  By chance, Marco escapes near death and bankruptcy.  By chance, Bat Segundo's late night radio show crosses lines with the "zookeeper/His Serendipity."  And by final chance, Quasar evades death by his own hands.  This novel features a series of characters all met by the fickle and elusive phenomenon we call chance.