Conclusions and beyond

Here's how I'm thinking my conclusion:

Given the many versions of Burden available in each scene, the narration of AKM demonstrates Silverman’s notion of reflexive masochism in various ways.  Principally, we have two Burdens, the first being the Burden who moves along with Willie Talos’s rise and fall, the second being the narrator/speaker.  Still, a multilayered focalization exists given that the narrating Burden deftly conjures memories, not as he currently remembers them, but as the past version of Burden remembers them as appropriate to the dramatized/recounted moment.  Accordingly, while the first, homodiegetic Burden, revisits his past to appropriate Anne’s affair with Talos by eliminating her agency and responsibility as he constructions his theory of the Great Twitch, the second, heterodiegetic Burden identifies with Cass Mastern and takes on more than his portion of the “awful responsibility” by mastering it through the art of narration.  Though more ostensibly damaged and traumatized, the homodiegetic Burden who is seen experiencing pain in the aftermath of Anne’s affair with Talos, Burden the teller (who likely feels the hurt all the more because he is married to Anne) forces himself to receive this trauma once again, though behind the curtains, as he’s both the narrator and principal narratee of this telling.  On the surface, the Long Beach Burden who agonizes more actively resembles Silverman’s read on T.E. Lawrence, but that doesn’t exclude the narration itself as a reflexive masochistic act given that the ultimate, heterodiegetic Burden reengages his trauma with such attention and authenticity throughout all the past versions of himself that he conjures.