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The Knife

The knife, which the man plans to use to kill his lover’s husband, stands for the man’s jealousy of his rival but, more important, also stands for the potentially lethal intersection between fact and fiction. When the man in the book creeps into the room containing a green armchair, we realize that fiction and reality have blended together and that the reader has become a part of the fictional world in his book. In this way, the knife serves as an anchor that links the two worlds together. Moreover, the fact that the knife symbolizes one thing in the book and something else in the story is typical of “Continuity of Parks,” which argues that colors, themes, symbols, and characters leap back and forth between our lives and our books, weaving the two together.

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