the unexplainable will be explained at the end of the story when we discover that the
protagonist has been hallucinating as a result of a military experiment, it still holds as an
illustration of the semiotic opposition between the very possible and the totally unacceptable
we find at the core of the fantastic effect, for the main narrative conflict relies upon the
desperate attempts of the main character to understand why people have vanished, which do
not constitute a coherent progression towards the truth, as is the case with detective fiction,
but rather reflect an increasing epistemological disorientation. At the structural level, not only
the rationally satisfying conclusion occupies a very reduced space in the economy of the
narration, but it also represents the beginning of an entirely new narrative syntagm, the themes
of which - space travel and isolation - establish narrative authority in their own right, albeit in a
rather elliptical manner and for a limited time only. “Where is Everybody?” might return from
the fantastic to the uncanny as soon as we are provided with a rational explanation to what
appeared to be irrational, even if this explanation is based upon temporary insanity,8 but only
at the price of a radical structural shift that introduces another situation, different characters,
and an entirely new set of concerns susceptible to generate narrative authority independently
and beyond the closure of the fantastic syntagm itself. The very first episode of The Twilight
Zone, micro-structurally significant by nature since it sets the tone for the entire series, is
therefore composed of two different narrations; the first and by far the most important in terms
of narrative economy and tension is fantastic, while the second, more suggested than
developed, belongs to the uncanny of the techno-scientific persuasion - not quite science
fiction - two tendencies which will be abundantly represented throughout the rest of the series.
Onomastically, The Twilight Zone mirrors the elements of its micro-structurally
representative first episode, for its suggests the basic semiotic binary opposition at the core of
the fantastic mode: whereas “twilight” points to indeterminacy and vagueness, both visually
and chronologically, “zone,” commonly associated with the military or administrative lexical
registers, refers on the contrary to a very realistic, specific notion of topographic measure,
hence not only to reality at large, but to a rationally structured reality, that which has proven to
be epistemologically sound and which determines our perception of what we may conceive as
8 Madness, along with death and dreams are privileged thematic domains in the fantastic as well as in the
uncanny, for they represent an intermediate area between understanding and ignorance: all three are very
tangible parts of the human condition but still elude rationalization.
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