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In Narcissus Transformed, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, a Lecturer in English and American Studies at the University of Regensburg, Germany, interprets Ovid's haunting myth of a beautiful youth who falls in love with his own image while gazing into a reflecting pool as an allegory of what the book jacket calls “the tragic situation of the postmodern subject.” The tragedy presumably lies in a vision of life in which the human self is unstable, decentered, indeterminate, and radically fragmented, making genuine communication and understanding futile. In such a world, not only is objective truth an absurd illusion but the search for knowledge is hopelessly doomed to failure.
Of all the characters in literature and mythology, Narcissus perhaps best dramatizes the consequences of blinding, self-destructive solipsism. And yet Narcissus long precedes the postmodern phenomenon. Since the beginning of the twentieth century psychoanalysts, philosophers, and literary critics have been intrigued by Ovid's complex myth. Kochhar-Lindgren devotes nearly half of Narcissus Transformed to a discussion of how Ovid's enigmatic youth has been interpreted by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and such postmodern theorists as Roland Barthes, Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, all of whom reject the idea of an autonomous, unified self. After summarizing the psychoanalytic, philosophical, and linguistic implications of narcissism, with its emphasis upon the inability to acknowledge the existence of the other, Kochhar-Lindgren