The South Dahlmann Summary

The South
The South is a story about a man named Dahlmann. It starts by naming the Narrators ancestors in the story and quickly explains how he his locked in a hospital due to a fatal disease caused by a head injury that he got by running into a door full speed. The conditions and his condition in the hospital are almost unbearable for one to think of. They shaved his head, fastened him to a stretcher with metal bars, and he was incredibly dizzy with nausea. It was very hard for Dahlmann to except the reality of his condition since he wasn’t given long to live and that is why I believe he created his own reality of going back home which was explained for over half of the duration of the story. The narrator gives you little hints that he still may be locked up in the hospital but it’s left up to the interpretation of the reader if he really is locked up in the hospital or he is truly returning back home for example, “He quickly recalled that in a café on the Calle Brazil (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat’s black coat that this contact was an illusion”. (The South) And this was followed by his descriptive details of his train ride along with the train stopping where it shouldn’t have which bears little resemblance to reality. And then he stages his own death with a knife fight with two trouble makers he met at the towns
He almost knew the certainty of his death but he chose this because as he stated, “he felt that to die in a knife fight, under the open sky, and going forward to the attack, would have been a liberation, a joy, and a festive occasion, on the first night in the sanitarium, when they stuck him with