Anton‘s Bark - Nine

Today, Otto reads Chapter Seven for us. This is the last chapter
Anton had been writing before he disappeared altogether. In this
chapter the fictional Otto remains amorphous, somewhere in his
memory. But he soon emerges, not quite into the Spitzenhof café
again, but into Father Promentano’s operatic version of it.
Otto’s reflections, following his reading of this chapter, centre
on problems of the ‘self’. This is a conundrum, given that his
own origins are to be found in a series of mystery novels. On
this question, Otto explains that he has long believed himself to
be an ‘automaton’, without the capacity to choose. While he was
still a lawyer in England, the fictional Otto had been in a
position to write a book about this. He completed the book before
his fictional self was destined to return to Vienna. What the
real Otto comes to realise about himself, and his written fate,
no to mention Anton’s own passage through the Unseen, is that by
stepping into the cave, the missing writer of Otto in Flames
would go onto trigger an ‘intensification of the phenomenon of
all possibilities’. This intensification includes some bizarre
ways of drafting Chapter Eight.