The White Hotel

The White Hotel

Donald Michael Thomas began his writing career as a poet, and his early work was notable for the way it ranged across the heights of the fantasy worlds of science fiction and of sensuality. Thomas was a superb writer, meticulous researcher, and a genius in deceiving the reader. He skillfully wrote The White Hotel, combining prose, poem, and science fiction, to make it a believable, conceivable, and a touching piece of literature. In his novel, Thomas makes realistic and believable references to Sigmund Freud and his psychoanalytic theories. Furthermore, he was able to capture the real Freud so well that many Freudian scholars believed this “case study” of Frau Anna G. to be a lost work of Sigmund Freud. This leads us to conclude that Thomas did not only possess a great imagination for fiction, but was also well studied in his accounts of Freud and the Holocaust.

Composed of a prologue and six sections, The White Hotel utilizes a variety of literary forms. The main characters of this novel are the celebrated psychoanalyst and theorist Sigmund Freud and Lisa Erdman, a twenty-nine-year-old, half-Jewish Viennese opera singer who comes to Freud for treatment of hysteria in 1919. This novel is by far one of the greatest works of English literature, exploring such concepts as, premonition, inhumanity, sexuality, and briefly, the concept of life after death. It is fashioned with many images of love, death, life, and desire, taking the audience on a horrifying and historical depiction of the Holocaust. Thomas’ novel is written using the third and first person narrator, which seems to have more knowledge than the reader or the character. I have to admit that I was distracted and even caught off guard by Thomas’ disorganization of chronological events. For example, the novel begins with presumably the middle of the story, after which the novel continues with the beginning and then ends the novel with a metaphorical new beginning for Lisa Erdman. Furthermore, many parallels and symbols can be seen in each section, which brilliantly connects them into a cohesive story filled with meaning and dire premonitions of an inevitable future.

Throughout this course, we have discussed various novels, from a psychoanalytic point of view, and we have been able to deconstruct many of the characters according to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories. Ironically, in The White Hotel, it is those theories that allow the reader to be misguided, and not realize the important symbolism of Lisa’s symptoms.