The Truth-Teller; or The Four-Armed Man

 Part 1
The first historical reference that I didn't understand in The Golden Notebook is on pages 152. It's in the Red Notebook. The Rosenbergs have just been executed for alleged Marxist activity and Anna opens a paragraph with a one-word sentence: "Koestler."

It turns out she's referring to Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian/German author who was once a dyed-in-the-wool Communist. Stalinism, however, proved too brutal for him and he left the Party in 1938. He went on to write several novels and biographies that essentially beat totalitarianism with a crowbar. (He later killed himself because he had been diagnosed with cancer, but that happened after this book was published. Still eerie, no?)

According to the Red Notebook, Anna has been reading Koestler, which hardly keeps her in with the Party. She paraphrases him, saying, "any communist in the West who stayed in the Party after a certain date did so on the basis of a private myth. Something like that." She then reflects, "what is my private myth?" This invocation of Koestler reveals Anna searching for the Truth. Ironically, she does not quote directly, as if the very words she's searching for Truth in are not all that important to that search.

Part 2

 I selected this image because it portrays the splitting of Platonic soulmates; I keep hearing Plato in The Golden Notebook as Anna strives for wholeness of Self. She seeks out that wholeness in other people, just as Plato's story of soulmates suggests: we need other people, we need connection, in order to be individuals.