Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

As a reader:

Julia Armfield’s “The Great Awake” follows a narrator who lives through a mass phenomenon of Sleep leaving people’s bodies and taking the form of shadowy, humanoid specters. When one’s Sleep leaves their body, they are no longer able to Sleep and are left in a resulting state of perpetual weariness. The phenomenon is almost entirely confined to cities, but not every city dweller’s Sleep leaves them. 

All Sleeps look the same, but have their own individual personalities, and do not always get along with each other. The narrator’s Sleep seems preoccupied with collecting small items, correcting picture frames, and rummaging through things, whereas her brother’s is more mischievous, actively trying to sabotage his acting career. The Sleeps have scents, too. The narrator’s Sleep was first described as smelling like orange peel and photo paper. These smells are “talismanic” — associated with her mother. Later, the narrator’s Sleep begins smelling like hard city water and her rusty shower drain. Interestingly, this change takes place shortly after the narrator notes that her new friend Leonie, who she has started developing feelings for, smells like hard city water. Soon after, the narrator’s Sleep takes her phone from her and hangs it up while she is talking to mother, just before she is about to mention Leonie. This series of events seemed connected and led me to wonder whether the personalities of the Sleeps were correlated to some internal part of their owners’ personalities, and by extension, whether the very presence or absence of a person’s Sleep was determined by some unidentifiable internal trait, such as anxiety or insecurity or what have you. It could be the case that the narrator was subconsciously nervous about telling her mother about Leonie, and her Sleep acted on that. However, this doesn’t account for why Sleeps are primarily a city problem, unless the story is a commentary on the pitfalls of city life.

At the end, the narrator’s Sleep peacefully disappears and she finally sleeps again. The narrator does not seem particularly surprised by this development, despite it being unheard of. My interpretation was that the way to get rid of a Sleep was to reach some kind of enlightenment or resolution to the internal struggle which brought the Sleep on in the first place. The narrator and Leonie seemed to be at a good place in their relationship when the narrator’s Sleep disappeared, just having kissed for the first time. The narrator describes her Sleep’s disappearance with the following sentence: “Leonie had gone, leaving behind the magazine but taking with her my Sleep.” To me, this strengthened the connection between the narrator’s Sleep and her relationship with Leonie. Of course, this interpretation begs the question of what the woman who murdered her Sleep had going on. 

As a writer:

Armfield chose to write this story from the first-person perspective of an ordinary person with no particular insight into the phenomenon, who reaches no realization or epiphany, but simply experiences the events in the same way as everybody else. By limiting the perspective in this way, Armfield places the reader in the position of the narrator. She also endeavored to create a realistic “what-if?” scenario by comprehensively and rather honestly depicting the variety of reactions people had (I thought early on that if this actually happened, some people would be trying to have sex with their Sleeps, and this was eventually confirmed). These choices lend a touch of realism to a fantastical story and leave the reader with more questions and speculation than concrete answers, as is often the case in life.