Editing Dhalgren (section)

==Plot overview==
The city of Bellona is severely damaged; radio, television, and telephone signals do not reach it. People enter and leave by crossing a bridge on foot.

Inexplicable events punctuate the novel: One night the perpetual cloud cover parts to reveal two moons in the sky. One day a red sun swollen to hundreds of times its normal size rises to terrify the populace, then retreats across the sky to set on the same horizon. Street signs and landmarks shift constantly, while time appears to contract and dilate. Buildings burn for days, but are never consumed, while others burn and later show no signs of damage. Gangs roam the nighttime streets, their members hidden within holographic projections of gigantic insects or mythological creatures. The few people left in Bellona struggle with survival, boredom, and each other.

The novel's protagonist is "the Kid" (sometimes "Kidd"), a drifter who has partial amnesia: he cannot remember either his own name or those of his parents, though he knows his mother was an American Indian. He wears only one sandal, shoe, or boot, as do characters in two other Delany novels and one short story: Mouse in ''[[Nova (novel)|Nova]]'' (1968), Hogg in ''[[Hogg (novel)|Hogg]]'' (1995), and [[Roger Zelazny|Roger]] in "We, in Some Strange Power's Employ Move on a Rigorous Line" (1967). Possibly he has [[schizophrenia]]: the novel's narrative is intermittently incoherent (particularly at its end), the protagonist has memories of a stay in a mental hospital, and his perception of reality and the passages of time sometimes differ from those of other characters. Over the course of the story he also experiences significant memory loss. In addition, he is dyslexic, confusing left and right and often taking wrong turns at street corners and getting lost in the city. It is therefore unclear to what extent the events in the story are the product of an [[unreliable narrator]].

Delany has stated that "Kid's sanity remains in question{{nbsp}}... for the same reason the disaster of the city is unexplained: such explanations would become a fixed signified straiting the play and interplay of the signifier – the city of signs – that flexes and reflexes above it."<ref name="SomeRemarks">Samuel R. Delany (writing as K. Leslie Steiner), "Some Remarks toward a Reading of ''Dhalgren''" in ''[[The Straits of Messina]]'', Serconia Press, Seattle: 1989 {{ISBN|0-934933-04-9}}</ref>