Zachary (1)

''This article is about the chapter. For the character, see Zachary Ezra Rawlins.''

"Zachary (1)" is the fourth chapter in the first book of The Starless Sea. It is the first chapter from Zachary's point of view and the fourth chapter overall.

Summary
It is January 2015, and Zachary has returned to campus before classes are set to resume. He goes to the university library to read and finds an old book called Sweet Sorrows. After flipping through the first few pages, he checks it out. The librarian cannot find it in the system, so she enters it in so that Zachary can check it out.

Zachary brings it back to his dorm room and begins to read it. To his surprise, the third story is about him, a time that he found a painted door in an alley. He investigates the book, and discovers images of a bee, a key, and a sword under the barcode sticker, the same images that had been painted on the door in the alley.

Major Characters

 * Zachary Ezra Rawlins

Minor Characters

 * Elena (unnamed, described as "student librarian")
 * Unnamed middle-aged librarian

Trivia and Connections

 * This is the only chapter from Zachary's point of view that does not start with either "Zachary Ezra Rawlins" or "The son of the fortune-teller."
 * Zachary notes that tiny flecks of gold dot the spine of Sweet Sorrows. Golden dust appears frequently throughout the novel, inside the Guardians' eggs or at the party in the ballroom.

Analysis
This chapter introduces Zachary as a real person, rather than as a character in a story. We learn that his field of study is Emerging Media Studies, specifically gaming. His hesitant personality is clearly on display in his interactions with Elena. Zachary clearly wants to take the book, but seems willing to yield it up if there is a problem scanning it.

At this point, the reader has read just as much of Sweet Sorrows as Zachary has. The different writing style between this section and the selections from Sweet Sorrows help to delineate the real and the unreal, but the connection between Zachary and his description in Sweet Sorrows begins to blur that line. This theme of the blur between myth and reality continues throughout the book until, in Book VI, Zachary is even identified as "the son of the fortune-teller" at the beginning of his own point-of-view chapters.

Quotes

 * Reading a novel... is like playing a game where all the choices have been made for you ahead of time by someone who is much better at this particular game.
 * Zachary Ezra Rawlins... wonders how, exactly, he is supposed to continue a story he didn't know he was in.