Pergrinus: Death as the Horizon
Pergrinus: Death as the Horizon
(The Books’ Journal, issue 166, pp. 64–67)
Death as the Horizon
Narrative, Interpretive, and Literary Approaches
Antonis Nikolis, Peregrinus. Novel. Armos, Athens, 2023, 512 pp.
Antonis Nikolis’s Peregrinus is not merely a novel of modern Greek literature, but a work
that lays claim to a place within World Literature. It draws on the ancient Greek novel,
Roman historiography, and the philosophical tradition, while incorporating narrative
techniques associated with modernism and postmodernism. Its ironic distance and thematic
complexity lend it both historical depth and universal reach. By bringing antiquity into
dialogue with contemporary narrative, philosophical inquiry, and metafiction, it enters the
international literary conversation with marked originality and considerable literary weight.
By Dimitrios Bosnakis
Just as we wash our bodies, so too ought we to wash our destiny; we ought to change our
lives as we change our clothes, not in order to preserve our lives, as when we eat and sleep,but out of that respect which others have for us, and which we rightly call cleanliness.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, passage 42
Introduction
Antonis Nikolis’s prose fiction constitutes an exemplary literary case. Beneath the authority of form and the evident pursuit of artistic perfection, his devotion to style and his ceaseless search for the right word express, if nothing else, an obsessive passion, one that might equally be understood as a desperate struggle against the absurdity of existence, a vision that appears to inform each of his works. His ascetic dedication to writing conveys not only severity and absolute artistic control, but also a distinctive combination of lyrical attentiveness, stark realism, metaphysical unease, and irony, drawing on some of the richest resources of literary expression.
Nikolis’s work to date is distinguished both by its continuous structural inventiveness in
narrative discourse, from the trilogy of love and suffering, Daniel Goes to the Sea, Dionysia, and The Death of the Mercenary, to the dystopian elegies The Dark Island and The Gym, and by the demands it places on language in matters of economy, plasticity, and rhythm. It is equally marked by an almost quixotic search for an ecstatic transcendence of reality, to which his narratives are subjected without compromise. It therefore becomes a particular challenge for the reader or critic to relate local detail to broader structures and to explore the difficult, at times paradoxical, relations between language and ideas. Literary criticism, in my view, ought precisely to attend to textual strategies and to the exact determination of linguistic and narrative codes, in order to approach as closely as possible the implicit discourse, the layered stratigraphy of the composition.
The analysis that follows examines in detail the plot and structure of the work, the author’s
narrative techniques, including sensory narration, the scenography of space and the use of historical and cultural context, as well as the psychography of the central character. It also suggests possible interpretive avenues through theoretical, philological, aesthetic, and even
psychoanalytic approaches that, in my judgement, are especially useful for a fuller
understanding and assessment of Peregrinus. Finally, the novel’s relation to Greek and
foreign literary tradition, classical, modern, and postmodern alike, is traced through elective affinities and productive influences in narrative architecture, syntactic patterning, and the texture and stratification of its language.
Plot Overview
The novel unfolds through a circular narrative movement and a concluding excursus, in
which the protagonist’s memory remains active and the protagonist himself appears almost
present in death. It is structured in seven chapters (“Logoi”) and centres on the turbulent and fractured personal trajectory of Peregrinus, during the course of his life, Peregrinus Proteus, and, at the end, Phoenix. This trajectory is situated within an epic-scale reconstruction of the historical and cultural world of the second century CE: the age of the Second Sophistic and of the ancient novel.
In constructing the hero’s “historical” biography, Nikolis draws on a relatively limited body of ancient literary testimony, above all Lucian’s satire On the Death of Peregrinus (see also The Life of Demonax 21.1,4; cf. Runaways 1–3) in the First Logos, and later, in freer fictional elaboration in the Fifth Logos, Aulus Gellius’s Attic Nights (8.3). These sources, of course, concern the figure of Peregrinus himself. As for the broader historical, cultural, and archaeological reconstructions that shape the novel, the author has immersed himself deeply in the full range of ancient Greek literature necessary for reimagining and reconstruction, from poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, and historiography to the dream manuals of Apollodorus, not to mention specialised archaeological scholarship on the monumental topography of cities and cultic practices.
Peregrinus is a man perpetually in search of identity, glory, and the attention of others,
wandering among cities and among philosophical and religious formations until his final
destination. As an elderly Cynic, on his seventieth birthday, determined to proclaim before
all, in the most illustrious setting of the ancient world, his contempt for the fear of death, he voluntarily throws himself onto the pyre at the 236th Olympic Games (165 CE), having
meticulously staged his celebrated departure as a theatrical performance. […]
Narrative Structure and Textual Strategies
Peregrinus is a complex, multilayered, and demanding work of narrative virtuosity and
formal innovation. The movement of the narrative is unbroken, though marked by
accelerations and decelerations, temporal leaps and pauses. Its progression does not readily
submit to conventional structures, but is animated by inner tension and musicality, by harsh or phantasmagoric descriptions of the external world, by densely stratified interior
monologues that register the tremors and fissures of the protagonist’s discontinuous
consciousness, though not of his alone, and by a fiery, continuous inward-outward gaze that vividly illuminates urban topography while constantly translating the underlying strata of lived experience and the endless search for identity and meaning.
I shall begin with the structure and techniques of the heterodiegetic narrative perspective,
focusing first on more traditional formal categories.
Peregrinus does not limit itself to a simple linear recounting of the hero’s already fractured
course, but fashions a multi-focal and indirectly polyphonic narrative construction that plays with the boundaries between historical documentation and fiction. In contrast to the
traditional structure in which narrative lines converge towards a climax, faire la pyramide, to use Flaubert’s favoured term, Nikolis attempts a reversal of the classical narrative pyramid. He creates two unequal and parallel narrative “pyramids”, the second of which expands and places under suspension the validity of the first, leaving the final interpretation of the story open and ambiguous. […]
The omniscient narrator observes the unfolding of events to the very end without overt
intervention, leaving the work of interpretation to the reader: was Peregrinus’s self-
immolation an act of supreme courage and transcendence over the fear of death, or did it
merely confirm the hero’s extreme vanity?
Through shifts of style, temporal sequence, and the layering of temporal planes, the author
makes subtle and intelligent use of established techniques of modern narrative. Interpolated fragments of time, memory, and dream, together with the frequent deployment of interior monologue and stream of consciousness, are notable throughout the text. Closer analysis also reveals the novel’s structural singularity within a dense intertextual framework marked by alternation between narrative levels. Its dialogue with the biographical tradition of late Roman antiquity is equally perceptible; yet rather than producing a coherent life story, it destabilises the linear representation of the heroic life. […] The structure of Peregrinus thus succeeds in creating a narrative universe in which historical truth and fictional reconstruction coexist in sustained tension. Above all, through the hero’s fluidity and metamorphoses, the novel formulates a postmodern meditation on the very nature of narrative and of human identity. […]
Peregrinus and Lucian
Peregrinus is presented as a character marked by megalomaniac and self-referential traits,
expressed both in his rhetoric and in his interior monologue. His mental style is shaped by
excessive rhetorical display and grandiloquent formulation; his speech is marked by self-
dramatisation and studied pomposity, full of references to heroes and philosophers. The
purpose of self-immolation is pushed one step further and is ultimately projected as a fantasy of evaporation.
The repetitions and ellipses in his speech suggest a deeper existential anxiety beneath the
theatrical mask, a vacillation between absolute conviction and subterranean fear.
“Like him, I too shall mingle with the ether, evaporate!”
“At the moment, the golden, the glorious moment when I shall… throw myself… into the
pyre.”
Lucian, by contrast, possesses an altogether different mental style, characterised by irony and rational detachment. He comments on Peregrinus’s excesses with sarcasm, almost with
contempt. His mode of observation is cold, almost forensic: he describes Peregrinus and his entourage in terms that suggest the analysis of a curious social phenomenon rather than that of a human being struggling with existential dilemmas. He is also marked by a refined
aesthetic sensibility: rather than yielding emotionally to the spectacle of Peregrinus, he
focuses on the beauty of the athletes and of art.
“O gods, what beauty, what grace!”
“What, I wonder, goes on in the minds of certain incurables, so that what seems a plausible
desire in adolescence, or perhaps youth, later becomes, despite unceasing disappointments,
the deepest, most persistent, lifelong pursuit?”
Here the formulation approximates an interior philosophical dialogue and functions as a
counterpoint to Peregrinus’s rhetorical grandiosity.
Antonis Nikolis’s Peregrinus succeeds in constructing a polyphonic mental style in which the narrator moves between panoramic vision and inward deepening. Peregrinus articulates a theatrical discourse of grandiosity, full of rhetoric but also of existential anguish. Lucian
adopts a consciously distanced, ironic idiom that undermines the solemnity of others. The
contrast between these two mind-styles creates a dynamic complex of narrative perspectives that lends the novel depth and complexity. […]
The spatio-temporal point of view in Peregrinus is highly complex and gives the work a
circular, reflective character. The narrator, focused on Peregrinus, moves within a composite spatio-temporality, following him either linearly or through interpolated flashbacks in a geographically fractured wandering that extends into the hero’s inner world. From this peculiar “coexistence” within Peregrinus’s body and consciousness, the narrator seems toclaim fuller spatial and temporal scope only in the first and last Logoi. The intervening Logoi continually produce a sense of transition fully aligned with the protagonist’s spatio-temporal fluidity.
An analysis of psychological point of view in Peregrinus confirms the narrator’s degree of
access to the characters’ thoughts and emotions, as the narrative alternates between internal focalisation—into the minds of Peregrinus or Lucian, and an external, distanced narration. Under internal focalisation, we see the world through Peregrinus’s stream of consciousness, especially in moments of crisis, self-examination, and solitude. Under external focalisation, by contrast, the narrator appears more detached and reliable, particularly in descriptions of the outward appearance of persons and cities.
When Peregrinus experiences inner agitation or crisis, the narrative becomes more personal and introspective, marked by extended reflection and long syntactic periods. In moments of action, during social interactions, for example, the narrator shifts towards an outward description that is almost clinical. This psychological perspective is characterised by a high degree of stylistic density, with strikingly long periods and interpolated subordinate clauses that add information or commentary. The narrative viewpoint combines distance, inwardness, and continual alternation between narrative levels.
The narrator seems driven by an obsession with detail, both in the description of spaces and in that of persons, gestures, and psychological states. For a character governed by fixations and obsessions, as Peregrinus is, the psychological point of view opens out a wide field of access, marked by repetition, excessive detail, and monomaniacal concentration on what concerns him most. Ultimately, the depth of this psychological perspective proves both reliable and multifaceted, since Peregrinus does not dominate as a hero-narrator presenting events from a partial point of view, but rather appears, through a discreet ironic distance, as a suffering human being marked by fissures and contradictions in his self-image.
“The ageing sophist found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. At times, even to keep his breath steady. A muffled inner seething distracted him. As though the narrow neck in the clepsydra of his life’s time were sucking down, with the labour of a cataract, the little water he had left.”
The narrative strongly foregrounds Lucian’s ideological perspective in the First Logos,
Peregrinus’s in the subsequent ones, and that of the remote narrator as well, thereby creating a dynamic relation between their personal values and historical reality. Peregrinus remains in continual search of identity and philosophical orientation, oscillating between sophistic culture, Christian belief, and Cynic philosophy; between the emotionally warm world of the Christians and the “frozen” world of the pagans; between the world of Roman power and his own ambitions; between his desire for distinction and fame and his need for inner peace; between consistency of doctrine and consistency of action. The work thus registers deep ideological tensions. Peregrinus, who philosophically appears to embrace a form of eclecticism, chooses self-immolation at the end of his life; the narrator, however, remains ideologically detached to the very end, steadily underscoring the moral unease and ambiguity of the hero’s age, and perhaps of our own.
Language in the work is never static. Linguistic perspective shifts according to emotional
charge and ideological intensity, adapting itself to the hero’s affective state and to the
immediate narrative frame, thereby sustaining variations of style and rhythm. When, for
example, the narration turns inward, the language becomes more reflective, dense, and
descriptively saturated. A marked presence of learned, elevated diction is combined with
contemporary choices from lower, colloquial, or popular registers. Descriptions of nature
acquire a poetic, almost lyrical dimension, mirroring Peregrinus’s inner condition. In scenes of social interaction, the language becomes more dialogic and spare; in scenes involving contact with imperial power, it becomes clipped and formal, revealing a different social dynamic. The narrator employs a mixed idiom that combines rhetorical or philosophical elevation with realist, experiential description.
More particularly, the coupling of high and low style, of words drawn from the learned Greek tradition alongside everyday, even “vulgar” expressions within the same sentence or syntactic period, is a bold and compelling technique with multiple literary effects. It overturns established linguistic hierarchy and produces an intense style that invites the reader to perceive language on new terms. The shift, for example, between affected or pompous diction and raw realism may function as a tool of deconstruction. The sudden movement from elevated, almost ritual language to something brutally ordinary can also generate a sharp comic or sarcastic tone. The author or narrator thus “undermines” his own style, reminding readers that language is never neutral, but always charged with cultural and social tensions.
Where the narrative adopts or imitates orality, this technique lends the style a natural, almost impulsive dynamism. Characters speak as they think, without filters, mixing linguistic registers. Yet this mixture may have another effect on the reader as well, rather like modern costumes in productions of ancient drama: it modernises the material, shifting the centre of gravity from past to present and infusing the narrative with a contemporary shiver and contemporary meaning.
In Peregrinus, then, Nikolis does not follow a single narrative perspective, but creates a rich mosaic of viewpoints, combining temporal complexity (flashbacks, circular narration),
psychological alternation (interior introspection and external detachment), ideological depth (identity, power, religion, and philosophy), and stylistic adaptability (archaism, lyricism, pragmatism, and contemporary colloquial diction).
Narrative and the Structure of Desire
I now turn to a briefer analysis of the novel’s narration, though one by no means of lesser
significance, in terms of literary theory as elaborated by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, where narrative is defined as a structure of desire. Brooks proposes that narrative is propelled by human desire and that plot is organised by an internal “economy of desire” directing narration towards culmination. If narrative is guided by desire, which creates inner tension and drives plot towards a climax, or, more precisely, if narrative is a mechanism fuelled by the desire for meaning and completion, then Nikolis’s Peregrinus constitutes an exemplary case study for approaching literary texture.
One may recall another striking observation from the same study: “narrative is one of the
large categories or systems of understanding that we use in negotiating reality.” Within this
framework, Nikolis’s novel is not only the reconstruction of a historical life, but also an
exceptional metaphor for the human desire, in this case, Peregrinus’s own, to organise the
chaos of existence through narrative, by choosing his own ending.
Peter Brooks’s theoretical approach to narrative centres on desire as the force that moves the story. Every person in Peregrinus’s age, like every character in the novel, follows his or her own moral and intellectual trajectory, through which passions, illusions, disappointments, and minor existential victories are experienced. Peregrinus, then, is a novel populated by individuals who, like ants in an anthill, seek their place within an uncertain and unstable world. Nikolis appears fully aligned with this position and exploits its dynamic through the hero’s continuous metamorphoses.
Peregrinus is indeed the hero of his own narrative desire. Brooks recognises that desire in
narrative concerns not only plot but also the psychological constitution of the hero.
Peregrinus’s desire for acceptance and glory is the driving force that shapes his course. In
Peregrinus, narrative is not merely a vehicle of representation, but a space in which desire is continuously processed. Brooks further argues that narrative structures imitate the workings of human desire and that narrative is never neutral, but always a process of management, postponement, and tension, feeding the very movement of plot.
Delay is one of narrative’s most effective strategies. Brooks indeed reminds us that the
postponement of resolution is a central feature of every narrative grounded in desire. In
Peregrinus, narration, precisely because it refuses a straight trajectory, functions as a
technique of delay. Peregrinus moves within a continuous narrative circuit, seeking an
identity that constantly escapes him. Each new phase of his life, his apprenticeship among the sophists, his involvement with the Christians, his final self-destruction, functions as a node of tension that is not resolved, but transformed into a new narrative, thereby sustaining the reader’s alertness.
The final act is not a resolution, but the ultimate projection of narrative desire: Peregrinus is not completed as a character, but remains an open question, a figure that invites multiple
interpretations. The hero wishes to become monumental, a figure that will remain in history; yet that very desire also renders him tragic, since his search leads not to stability, but to a final act of destruction.
Peter Brooks’s theory of the narrative economy of desire therefore offers a powerful
framework for understanding the metafictional structure of Peregrinus. The novel reproduces the dynamics of desire by creating a narrative experience founded on continuous tension, delay, and ambiguity. Narrative does not offer a fixed truth, but moves towards a horizon of completion that continually recedes; resolution is never absolute, but always subject tonegotiation. […]
Nikolis’s Stylistic Range
Antonis Nikolis’s Peregrinus is not merely a novel of modern Greek literature, but a work
that lays claim to a place within World Literature. It draws on the ancient Greek novel,
Roman historiography, and the philosophical tradition, while incorporating narrative
techniques associated with modernism and postmodernism. Its ironic distance and thematic
complexity lend it both timelessness and universal scope. By combining antiquity with
contemporary narrative, philosophical inquiry, and metafiction, it enters the international
literary conversation with originality and considerable literary force.
The protagonist, after a life of disappointments, chooses self-immolation over an existence of inert resignation. The drama of existence, moving illusions, the flight of imagination and self-entrapment, attraction to the multiplicity of life and paralysis before the inability to choose, all coexist in the novel’s narrative universe. The hero’s end is inscribed within this atmosphere of absurdity and derision, revealing the philosophical substratum of the work.
Nikolis uses irony and detachment as fundamental tools, adopting the posture of the creator who “imitates God”: he acts and remains silent. His writing bears traces of a Flaubertian self-undermining, in which lyrical inspiration coexists with realist scepticism. Irony does not function merely as a negation of lyricism, but as a way of bringing it into sharper relief through the continuous dialectic between emotion and dismantling. The lyrical element exists in order to be overturned; yet its very deconstruction confirms the seductive power it exerts upon the writer’s sensibility.
Nikolis’s irony is not simply an instrument of deconstruction, but a means of revitalising
narrative. The author loves and simultaneously ironises what he loves, particularly the
metaphysical extensions of his story, casting doubt even on his own convictions. The novel
maintains a delicate equilibrium between lyrical elevation and sarcastic demythologisation, as the hero moves from transcendence to absolute collapse. The tragic sense of the absurd leads into the grotesque, and from there into a deeper existential anguish.
Nikolis’s novel challenges classical categorisations, proposing new approaches to historical narrative, philosophical reflection, and literary form. Its polyphony, existential problematic, and intertextual and performative dimension make it one of the most complex and compelling works of contemporary Greek prose. The hero remains in constant metamorphosis, while the narrative is shaped by the theatricality of his existence. The novel belongs to the tradition of the historical novel, combining the structure of desire, as analysed by Peter Brooks, with the formal typology and historical totality of Georg Lukács.
The relation of Peregrinus to philosophical and psychoanalytic interpretation, drawing on
Sartre, Freud, and Lacan, also opens readings of the work that do not remain confined to the question of historical representation, but investigate, through more recent conceptual tools, the nature of narrative, memory, and human desire.
Conclusion
Nikolis creates a work that invites the reader to reflect on the human condition through a
multifaceted narrative perspective. The combination of realism and existential elegy gives the narrative an intensity that both moves and unsettles. Completing the novel leaves behind a sense of sadness and emptiness, but also of redemptive clarity: the sense that the book has approached the limits of narrative art.
Peregrinus is a work that demands repeated readings and perhaps becomes more fully
intelligible once life itself has already left its marks. As Louis-Ferdinand Céline might have put it:
“C'est peut-être cela qu'on cherche à travers la vie, rien que cela, le plus grand chagrin possible pour devenir soi-même avant de mourir.”
(“Perhaps that is what one seeks throughout life, nothing but that: the greatest sorrow
possible, in order to become oneself before dying.”)
