38 AARON C. EASTLEY

enter into her, bidding her to change. As the novel says: "dans I'ombre
qui s'epaississait et puis gagnait son coeur, -l'invitant subtilement aux
metamorphoses ..." "the darkness deepened and invaded her heart,
subtly bidding her to change" (73, 88). Pressured almost to the point
of despair, she embraces as it were this final option for self-
determination, and giving up her masked schizophrenia she ceases to
be "Deux-ames" and becomes "Solitude," a young woman freed in spirit,
but at the cost of at least a temporary alienation from both others and
herself.
 Both the functionality of this freedom and the reality of its terrible
price are made evident in Schwarz-Bart's text. To begin with, in the
passage in which Solitude first proclaims her new name, we watch as a
white man stops and asks her name. Solitude, in response, stands up
from her hoeing in a field, and as she will do frequently from this point
on, laughs. "Ce rire, ""This laugh" Schwarz-Bart writes, is the laugh of
persons, "qui ne sont plus l, car elles naviguent dans les eaux de la
Perdition." "who are absent, floating on the waters of perdition" (75,
90). And after she gives it, Solitude speaks, in "d'une voix monocorde,
mais toujours traversee par ce mime rire, ... les paroles qui devaient
s 'attacher a elle, tout au long de sa br&ve &ternitd: -Avec la permission,
maitre: mon nom est Solitude. "a monotone shot through with the same
laugh, . the words that were to cling to her throughout her brief
eternity: 'By your leave, master: My name is Solitude." This monotone
voice, infected with the lunatic laughter of one far away, metonymically
represents Solitude's new condition. It is an escape without salvation,
a life-preserving (or perhaps more precisely a life-postponing) survival
tactic whose paradoxical price (at least in the short term) is life itself.
As Solitude will later say to le chevalier de Dangeau, a man in whose
house she lives as a zombi-corne for many years, when he asks, "Et toi
pauvre zombi qui te delivrera de tes changes?" "And you, poor zombie,
who will deliver you from your chains?": "Quelle chaines, Seigneur?"
"What chains, Seigneur?" (79-80, 97).
 Despite the dear cost, however, the benefits of this estrangement
from the world are two-fold. First, her withdrawals do lead to actual
changes in her living arrangements, with her being removed in one
instance from entertaining whites in the parlors and bedrooms of the
house of Dangeau to the kitchen, and later, the fields-places where
she is actually more at peace. Specifically, in the house of Dangeau
Solitude is exquisitely groomed and kept as a human drawing room
curiosity. Such a role is violently at odds with her own deep-rooted
loyalties, and as she is pushed near her breaking point she is troubled