“The first should be June 12, the second June 19, and the third June 29.”
I know now the span of my life. God help me!
This part of today’s Dracula hits SO MUCH HARDER when you’re reading it in real time.
Like I KNOW it’s May 19th right now because it is. I feel how much time there is until June 29th. And it’s a long time, but knowing that’s how long you have to live? Fuck, man.
Honestly though Jonathan’s situation is as horrific from a pyschological horror standpoint as it is from a supernatural perspective. The Count knows Jonathan knows, and he knows he’s helpless and he is playing with his food. The little letters tricks was a total power move, he knows that Jonathan is aware that he’s just been given the date of his own execution, but he’s making Jonathan do this playacting that Things are Normal because he wants to watch Jonathan dig his own grave at gunpoint. It’s pretty chilling.
Yet if I were a young man traveling in a foreign country where religious villagers kept warning me not to visit a mysterious nobleman (but refused to even speak of what precisely was so scandalous about his nature) my first thought would be less “the Count is a supernatural being who will murder me and my loved ones” and more “the Count is an infamous homosexual and the repressed villagers fear for my chastity, I am surely in danger of seduction ”
I talked about this earlier as an update to a different post but like. Drac is so fucking bad at not looking or sounding suspicious. Like, ridiculouslybad.
And you know what? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if not one single person actually believes that he’s a totally normal human guy, because Dracula doesn’t need people to believe him to get them to go along with him, to do what he says, to bend to his will. He’s so bad at lying because he doesn’t actually need to; you could say he’s out of practice.
Realistically, nobody’s going to oppose him because he’s just that powerful, both in a physical sense and in a socioeconomic sense. It does not matter if Jonathan believes the Count’s flimsy-as-fuck excuse for why he needs to write those letters, because he’s going to do it, or else.
Little worried about Jonathan if I’m honest. If I don’t hear from him before the prewritten letter dates then I’m calling the police, possibly even Christians.
I do appreciate that the base for this part of the book isn’t the supernatural horror, but the horror of being kidnapped. Like, the supernatural aspects make it even *more* horrifying, but at its core Jonathan Harker is a man locked in a castle, with no way put, totally reliant upon someone else for his meals and safety.
And that other person is making him write “all clear” letters to his loved ones.
I made a short post about this yesterday, but I want to discuss how the brevity of the recent entries convey the horror of the situation.
The first entries establish one thing about Jonathan Harker: He writes down every detail of his experience from the spicy chicken to the weird dreams to all the things that people say to him (even when he dismisses these things as unimportant superstition.) He is long-winded and detail oriented when he’s comfortable. Arguably because part of this exercise is to have a shorthand journal that Mina can read later, so he wants her to have the details of his trip.
Then it becomes a kind of coping strategy. As the May 12th entry establishes, he is writing down facts to ensure that he isn’t imagining his experiences. He has no one to talk to, so he confides in his journal. He takes writing down facts as a way to confirm to himself that strange things really are happening. Like winding his pocket watch, it is something to ground himself.
The brevity of the recent entries really shows that his coping has failed. He cannot reassure himself with facts, since the reality has become too supernatural and dangerous for that.
For example, earlier he wrote down the Count’s long description of the history of the region practically word for word. In today’s (May 19th) entry he writes a quick summary of the conversation with the Count with no exact dialogue.
It is a very clever way to show that Jonathan is becoming increasingly terrified and everything he has to comfort himself is failing. Modernity cannot save him now.
In a first person way, it shows the collapse of the rational in the face of monsters - which is a central theme in Gothic literature.
I’m so pop culture poisoned I had no idea count dracula was fun. I’ve never read the book before so I was expecting this gloomy, intimidating “extremely do not make eye contact” type of guy. but OG drac is just a goofy dude inviting his new buddy jonny harker over to his big house where he lives alone for movies night and popcorn while going hee hee hoo hoo I’m definitely NOT a creature of the night hee hee I’m a very normal older gentleman from this century!! don’t worry about me bookin it the moment dawn breaks tee hee!! ohhh no don’t look at my coffin in the other room!! he’s a total party guy. I’d deffo put my life at stake(!) to come hang out with him and play ye olde playstation. I finally understand what’s so sexy about dracula
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