So It Spirals: Fibonacci Structures in House of Leaves and Slaughterhouse-Five

 In both Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, the authors craft narratives that coil and twist in patterns reminiscent of the Fibonacci sequence’s spiral. Each novel uses recursive growth, nonlinearity, self similarity, accumulation, and spiraling form as storytelling devices, creating structures that mirror the psychological landscapes of trauma and memory. Much like a Fibonacci spiral in nature (where each new curve expands on the last, ever circling outward) these two books unfold their stories in loops and layers. The result is literature that feels at once fragmented and cohesive: disorienting structures that ultimately reveal deeper truths. This essay will explore how House of Leaves and Slaughterhouse-Five use such spiral-like, additive structures as a lens to express themes of trauma, memory, and temporality. Despite one being a postmodern horror love story and the other a wartime science-fiction satire, both novels invite us to traverse mazes of narrative that expand recursively, forcing us to confront horrors and hopes in a non-linear, accumulative way. Through specific examples and quotes, I aim to show how Danielewski and Vonnegut compare and contrast in their use of Fibonacci-esque structures to capture the elusive experience of living with trauma and the fragmented nature of memory.

The Fibonacci sequence begins with 0 and 1, and each number that follows is the sum of the two before it: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13... and so on. It appears everywhere; in pinecones, hurricanes, sunflowers, and galaxies, revealing nature’s quiet, recursive logic. But it’s not just a mathematical pattern; it’s a shape of unfolding, of accumulation, of return. In literature, this spiral can become a metaphor for memory, trauma, and nonlinear time; for stories that do not move forward cleanly, but curve back, doubling, echoing, layering upon themselves.

House of Leaves is a novel constructed as a nesting of narratives, a book about a manuscript about a documentary film, stories within stories that reflect and refract one another. This layered, recursive structure is immediately apparent. The novel even begins with a warning on the dedication page: “This is not for you.” A perplexing, metafictional epigraph that hints at the book’s self-referential maze. Danielewski then plunges the reader into a convoluted textual labyrinth. We meet Johnny Truant, who discovers the academic manuscript of a blind man named Zampanò, which is an analysis of a film (the Navidson Record) that, tellingly, may not even exist. The narratives are entangled like a spiral: Truant’s footnoted commentary winds around Zampanò’s scholarly text, which in turn chronicles Will Navidson’s exploration of an impossibly morphing house. Each layer builds on and echoes the others, creating a mise en abyme of storytelling. House of Leaves is a maze, a labyrinth that puts you in a set of nesting narratives. The structure is recursive: footnotes lead to more footnotes, sometimes even looping back or sending the reader to an appendix only to return again, a “recursive playground” where the act of reading mimics the very maze the characters are trapped in. This unconventional format forces the reader to become a participant, doubling back and retracing pages, spiraling through the story much as the characters spiral into obsession and madness.

Crucially, Danielewski uses this Fibonacci-like recursive form to reflect the themes and emotional experience of the story. The house on Ash Tree Lane, the central horror of The Navidson Record, expands in impossible ways, growing additively like the Fibonacci sequence itself. What starts as a single mysterious hallway gradually accumulates into an endless maze. At first, the Navidson family discovers a black hallway where none should exist; soon they find that inside their house lies a labyrinth of endless corridors, rooms, and a gigantic spiral staircase descending seemingly forever. The interior of the house is potentially infinitely larger than the outside, a mind bending violation of space that evokes the ever growing, never ending progression of the Fibonacci spiral. In one exploration, a team of adventurers spends days descending the colossal staircase, which appears to descend endlessly into darkness. This literal spiral within the story embodies recursive growth: the deeper you go, the more there is; hallways leading to rooms leading to more hallways, an expansion limited only by imagination. The novel’s very physical layout mirrors this spiraling descent. Danielewski famously plays with typography and page design: at times the text itself snakes around or shrinks to a trickle on the page, mimicking the claustrophobic tunnels or the vertiginous drop into the house’s depths. I can note that the book becomes a visual and typographic playground, with text that spirals, inverts, and shifts direction, mirroring the disorientation experienced by the characters within the house. When Navidson finally ventures to the deepest core of the maze, the pages contain just a few words surrounded by blank space, as though the prose itself has been swallowed by the void. By structuring the novel in this way, Danielewski makes form and content reflect each other: the reader feels lost and unsettled, wandering a textual maze as Navidson wanders the physical one. This self-similar pattern (small scale elements of the book like footnotes or page layout mirroring the larger narrative of the house) is akin to a fractal, or the way each curve of a Fibonacci spiral is a smaller echo of the whole.

Beyond structure, House of Leaves uses its spiral narrative to delve into character psychology and themes of trauma and memory. The expanding house has often been interpreted as a metaphor for the unknowable darkness within the human psyche, a trauma or sorrow that grows larger the more you examine it. The characters’ experiences inside that house are deeply traumatic: they face existential terror, loss, and madness in its lightless halls. Notably, the novel’s horror is not a cheap thrill; it is hauntingly beautiful, a quiet descent into madness, filled with disturbing sadness as much as dread. Will Navidson becomes obsessed with documenting the phenomenon, risking his life and family; his partner Karen and their children suffer fear and uncertainty as their home literally betrays them. Later, Navidson’s brother Tom is killed when the house abruptly shifts, a tragic loss that leaves emotional scars. These traumas are not presented in a straightforward narrative arc, but in fragments (interview transcripts, found footage descriptions, diary entries, and Truant’s reminiscences) that the reader must piece together. This fragmented approach conveys how memory and trauma often operate: not as a neat linear story, but as bits of recollection and feeling that we circle back to repeatedly.

Indeed, House of Leaves itself harbors a buried core of personal trauma that is revealed through recursion. As Johnny Truant annotates Zampanò’s chronicle, he interjects increasingly troubling stories from his own life, as if drawn in by the house’s darkness. Johnny’s footnotes begin relatively light, but soon they spiral into tales of paranoia, nightmares, violence, and the resurfacing of childhood trauma. We learn that Johnny grew up with an institutionalized mother, Pelafina, whose long, erratic letters (included in an appendix) reveal her mental illness and an attempted act of harm that haunts Johnny’s past. These Whalestoe Letters are written in a desperate, rambling style that eerily mirrors the madness found in Zampanò’s manuscript, a recurring pattern across narrative layers. The effect is that Johnny’s present reality starts to echo the fiction he’s editing. He becomes increasingly unstable, seeing moving shadows in mirrors and feeling something inhuman behind him in the dark. The deeper Johnny delves into the story of the house, the more his own sanity fractures, a downward spiral brilliantly rendered by Danielewski’s interwoven format. By the end, Johnny has lost touch with reality, his narrative breaking down into incoherent passages. In the final twist of self-reference (and self-similarity taken to the extreme), House of Leaves even appears as an object within its own story: at one point, Will Navidson (trapped in the pitch-black maze) finds a book titled House of Leaves and begins burning its pages for light. This startling moment of recursion suggests that the characters are aware of, or caught in, the very story we are reading. It’s a labyrinth of fiction and reality folding in on itself, much as trauma can blur the boundaries between past and present. We as readers are left to wonder: are the ghosts in the house real, or are they manifestations of the characters’ inner demons? Is Zampanò’s academic treatise a fact or hoax, or could it be Johnny’s own delusion? The novel pointedly refuses to resolve these questions, instead spiraling into ambiguity. In doing so, House of Leaves poignantly captures the emotional truth of trauma and memory; how they resist easy explanation, how one keeps returning to them, circling the void at the center of one’s experiences. The form (a twisting, recursive narrative) and the content (a story about grappling with an unfathomable horror) are inseparable. Danielewski’s approach is sincere and artistically daring: through academic satire, typographical art, and genuine emotional depth, he makes the reader feel the endless, accumulating weight of fear and grief.

Where House of Leaves spirals through space and text, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five spirals through time and memory. Subtitled “The Children’s Crusade,” this novel follows Billy Pilgrim, an American soldier who survives the firebombing of Dresden in World War II, and who later insists that he has become unstuck in time. The book’s structure is famously nonlinear, “short and jumbled and jangled,” in Vonnegut’s own words, leaping back and forth across the timeline of Billy’s life. In one chapter Billy is a POW witnessing the apocalypse of Dresden; in the next, he is a middle-aged optometrist in Ilium, New York, or a young groom on his wedding day, or an old man in a surreal alien zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. These shifts are abrupt and frequent, creating a disorienting collage of moments. The effect is much like a Fibonacci sequence or a fractured spiral: events do not progress in a straight line, but keep circling back on themselves, each return adding a new layer of understanding or irony.

Vonnegut makes this unusual structure immediately clear to the reader. In Chapter 2, the narrative voice commands: “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” Billy’s life is laid out not as a continuum but as pieces of a puzzle for us to assemble. We learn that Billy has seen his birth and death many times and pays random visits to all the events in between. He has no control over these jumps; he is a passive traveller in his own chronology, spastic in time and plagued by constant anxiety because he never knows what moment will come next. This literalizes the experience of traumatic flashbacks, Billy’s time travel is a vivid sci-fi metaphor for how past trauma repeatedly intrudes upon the present. Just as a person with PTSD might mentally return to a battlefield without warning, Billy flips from a quiet 1960s suburb to January 1945 amid falling bombs. Nonlinearity becomes the novel’s way of representing a shattered psyche. One scholarly analysis notes that the book’s disordered timeline is modeled on the Tralfamadorian concept of a novel, which has no beginning, middle, end, or suspense; all moments existing at once. By telling Billy’s story out of sequence, Vonnegut denies us the comfort of conventional narrative cause and effect. Instead, we get the effect (Billy’s postwar alienation and fatalism) before we see the cause (the horrors he witnessed in Dresden), a structural choice that powerfully underscores the senselessness of war. As Vonnegut bluntly puts it in the first chapter, he made the story jumbled because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. The broken form itself is a statement: war’s destructiveness defies neat order or meaning.

This additive, recursive structure manifests in several ways throughout Slaughterhouse-Five. One of the most notable is the novel’s use of repetition, a technique of accumulation akin to a refrain in music. The phrase “So it goes.” recurs like a solemn mantra every time death is mentioned, appearing again and again no matter how trivial or catastrophic the loss. A bottle of champagne goes flat: “So it goes.” A man is executed for stealing a teapot: “So it goes.” 130,000 people perish in Dresden’s flames: “So it goes.” By the novel’s end, this phrase has been repeated over a hundred times , a haunting echo that grows louder with each iteration. In a sense, Vonnegut is stacking the deaths on top of each other, forcing the reader to confront the sheer accumulation of loss. Yet the phrase is deliberately flat and resigned, reflecting Billy’s Tralfamadorian inspired belief that death is just one moment among many. So it goes. Each repetition is the same, and in that sameness there is a kind of bleak comfort and also a critique: if one reacts to every death with equal, numbed acceptance, has one not lost some humanity? The self similarity of the refrain (always identical in wording) suggests that from the distant viewpoint of Tralfamadore, every death is the same, whether an old dog dies peacefully or an entire city is incinerated. This chilling equivalence is Vonnegut’s satirical way of highlighting how war makes tragedy monotonous. At the structural level, “So it goes.” binds the disjointed episodes together, much like a Fibonacci sequence’s recursive formula ties its disparate numbers into a single pattern. The phrase becomes the novel’s dark heartbeat, pulsing steadily through the chaos of time jumps.

Another recursive pattern in Slaughterhouse-Five is the way key events spiral back into view repeatedly. The narrative keeps circling the traumatic center of Billy’s life: the Dresden bombing. We hear it foreshadowed early on, we visit it in fragments (for instance, the aftermath in the slaughterhouse where Billy and other POWs emerge to find the city melted and silent except for birds), and we return to it near the end in full horrifying detail. Billy’s mind continually orbits this moment, never fully escaping its gravity. Similarly, certain images and stories reappear across time: the Cinderella play performed by British POWs, the amber in which moments are trapped, the war widow demanding to know if Billy’s massacre story will glorify war. Even Vonnegut himself appears twice in the book; as a narrator in Chapter 1 and cheekily as a minor character witnessing the firebombing alongside Billy in Chapter 10, saying “I was there.” This creates a metafictional loop wherein the author’s reality and Billy’s fiction mirror each other. It also emphasizes that Slaughterhouse-Five is as much about Vonnegut processing his own war trauma as it is about the invented Billy. Vonnegut’s voice so closely parallels Billy’s that he serves as a secondary protagonist himself, linking the real Dresden survivor to his fictional stand-in. This doubling is another form of self similarity: the character and the creator share the same trauma, just as separate curves of a spiral echo one shape.

Despite the novel’s outlandish elements the emotional core is profoundly human and sincere. Vonnegut writes with a mix of satirical wit and genuine sorrow that gives the narrative an achingly bittersweet tone. The non-linear structure allows him to juxtapose moments of absurd dark humor with moments of heartbreaking clarity. For instance, Billy passively watches a war film backwards (in one of his time-slips) and imagines it as a story of destruction undone: bombs are sucked back into planes, cities are rebuilt, and the warmakers are gradually turned into innocent boys. This wishful reversal highlights by contrast the irreversibility of what Billy lived through. Later, at a soothing post-war suburban anniversary party, a barbershop quartet’s song suddenly sends Billy into a dissociative spiral of grief; he finally weeps for Dresden, though he does not consciously know why the singers’ harmless faces horrify him. Such scenes illustrate how traumatic memory hides and resurfaces unpredictably, much as Billy’s jumps throw him without warning from tranquility into terror. Indeed, as Billy ages, his perspective on the war mutates; his breakdown at the quartet reveals that even decades later, the past is not truly past. Vonnegut’s nonlinear approach captures this truth: Billy (and Vonnegut) must confront and re-confront Dresden from different angles in order to make any peace with it.

It is through the recursive revisiting of trauma that Slaughterhouse-Five finds its poignant resolution, or rather, its conscious lack of one. The novel ends with the war over and Dresden in ruins, time resuming its forward flow. Vonnegut closes with a return to the birds, who ask, in the face of unspeakable carnage, “Poo-tee-weet?” a nonsense sound. Like the spiral that ever circles and never arrives at a neat conclusion, the story loops back to silence and absurdity. In an earlier draft letter, Billy wrote, “All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” To him, time is not an arrow but an intricate pattern where every point is reachable. There is comfort in this fatalistic philosophy (he no longer fears death, since in other moments he is forever alive), yet there is also a deep sadness. It means that Billy can never truly leave his worst moment behind; he is, as he says, “Trapped in amber,” preserved forever in the trauma even as life goes on. Vonnegut’s genius is that he communicates this entrapment through the very form of the novel. By experiencing the story in a scrambled order, us as he readers come to feel a bit of Billy’s condition: we cannot move linearly from cause to effect, we must absorb the pieces and live in the middle of the puzzle, just as Billy is unstuck in time. The narrative is an additive spiral: each return to a scene adds emotional weight or a new understanding (much like each number in the Fibonacci sequence adds the previous two, growing in significance). And like a spiral, the novel’s path eventually circles near where it started having encompassed many angles of trauma but acknowledging that no simple conclusion or moral can suffice for something as horrific as a massacre.

Both House of Leaves and Slaughterhouse-Five use their swirling, recursive structures to delve into the depths of trauma, the unreliability of memory, and the fluidity of time, but they do so in intriguingly different ways. Comparing the two, we see a common impulse to break traditional linear storytelling (an acknowledgment that pain and memory do not follow a neat chronology) yet each author’s strategy and tone diverge, reflecting the distinct nature of the traumas depicted.

In House of Leaves, trauma is couched in the language of horror and psychological fragmentation. The central trauma is amorphous, even fantastical: an ever changing house that defies physics, instilling profound existential fear. This is not a single historical event but rather an ongoing nightmare, a place that embodies trauma. Appropriately, Danielewski’s structural approach is to create a labyrinth; multiple storylines and voices weaving, conflicting, and doubling back. This labyrinthine form itself becomes a metaphor for traumatic memory: the characters (and readers) must navigate a maze of documents and recollections, never sure which path leads to truth or madness. The novel emphasizes accumulation and recursion (footnotes piling up, references within references) which suggests how trauma can compound over time. Johnny Truant’s mental collapse, for example, is triggered by Zampanò’s manuscript but also fed by the resurfacing of older wounds (his mother’s letters, his childhood abuse). Those past and present sources of psychological pain converge through the book’s recursive structure. The more Johnny reads about the house, the more his own buried traumas come to life, as if summoned by the story. This creates a powerful self-similar effect: the Navidson family’s terror in the house (losing their way in the dark, fearing a nameless beast, experiencing time and space disintegrating) mirrors Johnny’s terror in his Los Angeles apartment as he feels the walls closing in on him mentally. Even though the specific content of their trauma differs, the shape of it; disorientation, paranoia, a sense of endless falling is repeated. Danielewski thus uses the Fibonacci-like spiral not only structurally but conceptually: the micro-level (Johnny’s psyche) and the macro-level (the house’s mystery) reflect each other, smaller and larger spirals of the same pattern of trauma. It’s telling that both Navidson and Johnny become obsessed with recording or mapping their experiences (Navidson with his film, Johnny with assembling the manuscript) as a way to cope; a kind of compulsive recursion, replaying events in hope of mastering them.

Slaughterhouse-Five, on the other hand, grounds its trauma in a very concrete historical event (the firebombing of Dresden) and the personal aftermath of war. Vonnegut’s approach to structure, while also non-linear and recursive, feels looser and more fragmentary than Danielewski’s meticulously nested puzzles. The narrative skips like a stone across the waters of time, giving us brief, vivid vignettes of Billy’s life. This captures a different quality of traumatic memory: flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, time dilation and contraction. Instead of a carefully built maze we must consciously navigate, Vonnegut drops us without warning into past or future scenes, mimicking how a traumatized mind involuntarily revisits moments. The organizing principle is emotional more than logical; one scene triggers the next by associative logic (an old war movie on TV sends Billy’s mind back to WWII; the sight of hired barbershop singers at his anniversary sends him back to the ruins of Dresden). This seemingly haphazard arrangement is in fact very true to how memory works, especially traumatic memory, which often returns in fragments and at unexpected times. Vonnegut’s narrative is thus recursive in the sense that it continually returns to core experiences (Dresden, the POW camp, the plane crash) and additive in that each return adds a new facet or even just another example of absurdity. Importantly, Vonnegut uses a tone of irony and gentle despair to bind these pieces, whereas Danielewski’s tone is one of creeping dread and earnest yearning. In Slaughterhouse-Five, humor (albeit dark) is a coping mechanism for trauma. The repeated “So it goes.” exemplifies this: it is both a statement of fatalism and a bitter little joke about the ubiquity of death. The reader comes to expect it, the way one might expect the punchline of a grim running joke, and that expectation itself is Vonnegut’s commentary on how numb we become to atrocity through repetition.

Both novels brilliantly use spiraling structures to represent temporality as experienced under extreme circumstances. In House of Leaves, time inside the house is distorted; minutes might stretch impossibly (Navidson’s five and a half minute hallway film suggests an experience that feels far longer than it objectively is) and days are lost in the windowless, clockless depths. Meanwhile the book’s chronology is non-linear: Johnny’s 1990s commentary intercuts with the 1990 house footage, and Pelafina’s 1980s letters appear at the end, casting a retrospective light on everything. This layering means the reader is effectively reading several timelines at once, another parallel to the house’s spatial anomaly. In Slaughterhouse-Five, time is the central theme, the Tralfamadorian idea that all moments exist simultaneously challenges our linear human perspective. Vonnegut plays with this idea by telling Billy’s life out of order, so that causality and sequential time become irrelevant to understanding his story. The spiral form emerges in how the narrative orbits around certain pivotal moments (especially the massacre at Dresden) rather than proceeding straight through them. I might say Slaughterhouse-Five is structured less like a line and more like a coil, looping through Billy’s timeline again and again, each loop bringing us closer to the emotional truth at the core. Notably, both novels end in a way that loops back to their beginnings: Slaughterhouse-Five finishes with the bird tweeting “Poo-tee-weet?”, an echo of the same birdsong that Vonnegut mentions in the first chapter , thus circling the narrative back to silence after massacre. House of Leaves concludes with Johnny’s final words and a series of appendices that leave eerie open questions, effectively bringing us back to the uncertainty of the introduction (“This is not for you.”). Neither book offers a tidy chronological conclusion; instead, they leave us with a spiral impression; a sense that these stories could be traversed over and over, revealing something new or significant with each cycle.

Despite these similarities, the contrast between the two novels is also instructive. House of Leaves is dense, multi-faceted, and deliberately challenging in its form; much like trauma that is repressed and encrypted, needing decoding. It demands an almost academic engagement (complete with citations, some real and some fake, in multiple languages) and thereby satirizes the act of trying to intellectualize horror. Danielewski suggests that getting lost in analysis (a recursive academic study of a fiction) is both a coping mechanism and a trap; an insight relevant to trauma, which we sometimes try to escape by rationalizing, only to find ourselves more entangled. Slaughterhouse-Five, conversely, wears a disarming simplicity on its surface, Vonnegut’s prose is plain and the episodes often very brief. Yet beneath that simplicity lies profound complexity in how the pieces resonate. Vonnegut does not ask the reader to solve a puzzle; he asks them to listen to a broken story and feel its brokenness. The sincerity of Slaughterhouse-Five shines through its black humor and sci-fi whimsy; it is, at heart, an emotional plea against war and a testament to human frailty, rendered in a fragmented way because a straight narrative would be too false to the subject. Danielewski’s sincerity, meanwhile, is couched in high-concept literary devices and a horror trope (the haunted house) that he elevates to an exploration of family, love, and sanity. Both authors achieve an emotionally grounded style within experimental forms: one through a plaintive, absurdist voice (“So it goes,” Billy’s quiet weeping, the tragic inevitability of death), the other through an immersive, multi-layered atmosphere (the reader’s terror and sorrow paralleling the characters’, the moments of beauty amid the fear, such as Navidson reading by the light of burning paper).

Ultimately, each novel expresses that to convey trauma and memory, conventional linear storytelling will not suffice. Instead, they employ recursive and additive structures that demand the reader actively engage in making sense of disjointed pieces, very much as survivors of trauma must do with their fragmented memories. The Fibonacci sequence, with its spiral growth and recursive definition, becomes a fitting metaphor: in House of Leaves, the narrative spiral draws us into a seemingly infinite regress of stories and commentary, building a towering structure of meaning and ambiguity from the simplest element, a dark corridor that was not there before. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrative spiral circles the unspeakable event at its center, accruing little insights, ironies, and sorrows with each rotation until we grasp the full weight. Both novels accumulate detail and emotion incrementally, rather than along a straight line.

Through sincere and innovative artistry, Mark Z. Danielewski and Kurt Vonnegut each find a form for the formless: giving shape to the spiral of trauma and the broken mirror of memory. House of Leaves burrows inward, a recursive labyrinth that enfolds readers in the dark, asking us to lose ourselves and discover meaning in its twisting corridors. Slaughterhouse-Five explodes outward, a jumble of time fragments that forces us to confront the absurdity and horror of war from all angles at once. Yet in both, there is a sense of spiraling motion; of stories and moments that recur and reflect, of structure that grows additively around an emotional core. Like a Fibonacci spiral found in nature’s most beautiful designs (the unfurling of a fern, the curve of a nautilus shell), these novels reveal patterns within chaos. They show how people survive the unsurvivable: by circling back through their memories, by finding refrains or rituals (“So it goes.”), by constructing elaborate meanings or even fantasies (a house with no end, a place where time is an illusion) to accommodate the unthinkable. Both books leave the reader with a lingering emotional resonance that is hard to articulate; a mix of sorrow, wonder, and catharsis that comes from having experienced something profoundly labyrinthine yet human.

In the end, the Fibonacci sequence is more than a clever structural analogy here; it is a reminder that growth and healing are not linear. They are recursive; we revisit old wounds, we spiral around our pain, sometimes deeper, sometimes wider and each loop can bring a new perspective. House of Leaves and Slaughterhouse-Five invite us to step into the spiral and see what lies at its heart. In doing so, they succeed in conveying the inexpressible: the way trauma warps time and space in our minds, and the way memory, however fragmented, can accumulate into understanding. Both novels, each in its unique voice, suggest that even in the most disorienting maze or the most jumbled timeline, there is meaning to be found; not in a final answer or linear plot, but in the experience of navigation, in the courage to face the darkness again and again until it yields a truth, or at least a story, we can live with. And so we carry these stories with us, their spirals continuing in our own imaginations, reminding us that this is what it feels like to be human amid inexplicable horrors; lost, perhaps, but striving to move forward, one step, one moment, one page at a time.

Works Cited:

• Danielewski, Mark Z. House of Leaves. Pantheon, 2000.

• Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. 50th Anniversary Edition, Dial Press, 2019.