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Popular Culture Review
given the beast that may be coming for him in the end. Most importantly, just as
Kafka illustrates the failure of reason by means of the animal’s inability to use
rational arguments to solve the problem of his burrow, so we see Grover forever
stymied by the reader’s insistence on turning pages even when rational
arguments have been given for why it is illogical to keep doing so. “Maybe you
do not understand,” Grover says calmly. “You see, turning pages will bring us to
the end of this book, and there is a monster at the end of this book.” Of course
we understand. But reason’s power is no match for the force of the book.
Modernity—with its fear of death, its false brick wall of technology, its fictional
sense of an impossibly coherent and stable self, its simultaneous invention and
villainization of the stranger/the Other, its doomed project of rationality that
creates the monsters from which it promises to protect us—modernity is the true
beast in our burrow.
But that is fine. For in reality—and in conclusion—we can admit that
this text is thoroughly po^ftnodem. Indeed, it is only when we consider the
possibility that this is a postmodern work that the book truly reveals its genius.
This is, after all, a book that is about itself, a book that (like every other book,
really) has no other content but its own text, referring to nothing but itself
because everything is the text.
It is a book where the start and finish are not what they claim to be.
That is, the first page of the book is not really page one, for it is on the cover of
the book and on the title page that Grover actually begins the story. We read the
title and all of the legal information, and Grover declares that it is a dull page.
“What is on the next page?” he continues, and we see him turning to the next
page. There are two things we must note about this: first, it is Grover himself
that starts turning pages in this book (not the reader) and thus it is Grover
himself that begins the narrative momentum of page-turning that will bring the
monster at the end; and second, Grover’s first claim to us is a lie, because even
he, on the next page—on what would be labeled, traditionally, the first page of
the book—exclaims “What did that say?,” explicitly acknowledging that the title
page was, in reality, anything but boring. Something similar happens as well at
the end of the book. We come to page twenty-two and are met with the words
“The End.” Grover calls this the end of the book, and since it is the end and no
one is there but Grover himself, he realizes that all along he was the monster that
was destined to be there. And yet, this page is not really the end of the book, for
when we turn the page—as the book has repeatedly shown us we must do—we
find another page and another part of the story: Grover covering his face in
shame and his exclamation that he is “so embarrassed.” The start is not the start
and the end is not the end. It is within the margins of this self-referential text
that we find the most meaning—no surprise, really, given that the book is under
an imprint the trademark of which is a letter reading a book. This logo, a little
golden “g” reading a little golden book, found on the front and back covers of
the book, bookends the story and, as our deconstructive reading would have it,
participates in the story as well. Language reads itself, the text inflates itself to