This chapter views John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas as a novel which is fully aware of the general tenets of Existentialism, and of the baggage that comes with being labelled ‘an alcoholic’, yet does not see that either of these categories are much use to him: the only way to live is to binge-drink his way to death. In taking this route the chapter views the novel as offering a response to Camus’s views in The Myth of Sisyphus around life’s meaning and the question of suicide. The chapter analyses the ways in which both ‘the alcoholic’ and ‘the prostitute’ choose their modes of existence, and how ‘love’ is ultimately not a viable source of meaning or salvation. The cultural context is very much that of an America deracinated by a hedonism for which the committed binge drinker becomes a logical endpoint, and in the face of which a philosophy like Existentialism begins to lose its purchase.

William Shakespeare's imagination could make things from a thousand years ago appear; but he could do so only by making his stage and his actors take on the convincing appearance of a thousand-year-old reality. The dramatic imagination is celebrated as a potent force, as a power that can invoke the dead, recuperate a vanished past, reconstruct a lost history. One of the tutelary spirits of this book is Clio, muse of history, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne: begotten by power and wisdom upon memory. The sweet song of Orpheus has powers beyond the 'grand / And louder tone' of Clio. Orpheus is classically a model for the historian, one especially apt today given our preoccupation with history as a waking of the dead. By means of his art Orpheus draws Eurydice out of the underworld.

In 'Some Characters Met With in Psychoanalytic Work', Sigmund Freud discusses some 'surprising traits of character' which he has detected in his patients. Freud's speculation on woman's childlessness evokes the third character, Rebecca West, the free-thinking woman in Ibsen's play Rosmersholm , partly complicit in the suicide of Beata, Johannes Rosmer's first wife. Freud writes a third section, 'Criminals from a Sense of Guilt', whose argument, while short, is fascinating: criminal deeds attempt to mitigate a sense of guilt. Freud continues to work with guilt in essays published in the 1920s. They include 'The Ego and the Id' and 'Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety'. Freud introduces another distinction, in referring to a differentiation within the ego by which it narcissistically looks at itself. He had considered narcissism when discussing the artist and creativity, in 'Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood', and further in 'On Narcissism, an Introduction'.

This chapter contains examples of attempts at criticism inspired by Sigmund Freud. The first uses Freud to consider a poem by William Blake, the second to interpret a familiar Sherlock Holmes short story. Freud compares Oedipus with Hamlet, and with Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, for the significance of parricide; but, in Blake, aggression toward the parents seems equalled by a perception of the parents' aggression. Freud discusses the ambivalence of people's feelings about themselves and each other, liking to hate and hating to like, having unconscious emotions ('affects'), and in doing so, follows Blake. The coincidence of dates between Holmes and Freud and the similarity of their methods are significant: detective and psychoanalyst both work by looking for clues, traces of the past.