While that interpretation would match the moral given in the original myth, the way in which Mazzucchelli draws the sequence does not seem to support that interpretation. As Hana is following Asterios up through the underworld, four panels are devoted to her trying to get his attention. She goes to his left, to his right, and to his left again, and then in the fourth panel, her face falls and the sense of movement dies. In the next panel Hana is still following Asterios, but her head is bowed, her posture shrunken, and the flowers that had been trailing after her now seem as if they are shedding and wilting, rather than flourishing. On the next page, Mazzucchelli draws a single rectangle divided into six panels: three square panels on the top, and three rectangular panels directly below. The lack of “gutter space”—the distance between panels— visually links the content of the panels together. This formatting is key to understanding the meaning of the Orpheus dream.


In the top three panels, Mazzucchelli draws Hana’s face and upper body. Beginning in the first panel and moving to the right, Hana’s head slowly tilts down, her hair draping over her face until it is completely obscured by the last panel. Simultaneously, in the lower panels, Hana’s and Asterios’s hands go from clasped in the first panel, to slowly releasing in the last panel. These postures are not showing someone who wants her freedom and expects Asterios to let her just follow; rather, they seem to be showing someone who has been ignored for too long and has finally given up. Thus, unlike the Greek myth, Asterios’s flaw does not lie in failing to trust her.  Rather—in keeping with the rest of the novel—Asterios’s problem is that he refused to acknowledge her. By the time he turns back, it is already too late—like his apartment, he has let their relationship burn.




For Asterios to move completely out of his entrapment of duality, however, his must face his ghosts head on: starting with Ignazio. After being struck by a man in the bar, Asterios has one last dream sequence featuring his dead twin. In this dream, Asterios finds Ignazio working on a car at the garage in Apogee. When Asterios asks him why he is there, Ignazio begins to describe Asterios’s life as if it were his own, using the exact same wording as he had previously used to narrate the novel. Asterios’s fears, that he and his twin would always live the same life no matter who survived the womb, are made manifest in this sequence, and Asterios has finally had it. He picks up a tire iron and, in the final panel of the sequence, the reader sees him pull his arm up as if to swing it at Ignazio—thus ending his torment of feeling as if he will always be incomplete.


After this moment, Ignazio’s voice ceases to narrate the rest of the novel.  When Asterios awakes, his left eye has been permanently damaged from the bar fight, leaving him half blind and devoid of his sense of parallax—but in its place, Asterios has been rewarded with color. Instead of the cyan/magenta world of his past or the yellow/purple world of Apogee and his dreams, this new reality is a mixture of reds, oranges, greens, yellows, pinks, purples, and, yes, blues. The shift from monochromatic dualism to the more diverse palette is a visual signal that Asterios has become more willing to see the world in multiple perspectives; there is no dualism at work any more.
