Analysis of “The House of Entities” in the Context of Great Thinkers (Contained in Mind at Large)

Oliver Frances’s short story is a compact philosophical allegory that stages a series of classic metaphysical and existential questions through dream-like encounters. Below is a reading of its central motifs against the work of major thinkers.

### 1. Illusion, Desire, and the Mirror  

The opening sequence with the harlequin and the empty hand-mirror is the story’s clearest philosophical set-piece.

- **Plato’s Cave**  

  The entity moves from a black-and-white “representation” into colour, then is told that the splendid Venetian carnival exists only if one looks through the harlequin’s mirror. This is a modern restaging of the Cave: most people prefer the projected shadows (or the desired image) to the bare facts. The harlequin’s claim—“There is no one so blind as he who does not want to see”—echoes Plato’s observation that the prisoners resist being turned toward the light.

- **Lacan’s Mirror Stage**  

  The empty mirror is particularly striking. In Lacanian terms, the mirror is supposed to give the infant an imaginary unity (the Ideal-I). Here the glass is missing; the entity cannot constitute itself through the Other’s desire. The harlequin, by contrast, rapturously contemplates a future that does not exist. The story therefore dramatises the difference between those who accept the Imaginary and those who confront its absence.

- **Schopenhauer**  

  The harlequin’s final cry—“spice up your own life with all those things for which you die, even though you neither have them nor do they exist”—is pure Schopenhauerian diagnosis: the will-to-live invents objects of desire precisely because the underlying reality is empty and painful.

### 2. The Cottage as Limbo of Archetypes  

Once inside the stone cottage the entity meets personified social roles—banker, politician, prostitute, priest, writer. They form a circular debate that never advances.

- **Dante’s *Inferno* / *Purgatorio***  

  The setting is explicitly called “a kind of limbo.” Like Dante’s neutral angels or the virtuous pagans, these figures are neither damned nor saved; they are suspended in the identities they once performed. Their conversation is a secular *contrapasso*: each continues to speak the language of the profession that defined him or her in life.

- **Marx and Ideology**  

  The banker and the politician embody the critique of ideology. Money and political rhetoric are presented as systems that promise happiness while extracting it. The prostitute’s retort—that she performs a “social service”—is a darkly ironic version of Marx’s claim that even the most private relations are mediated by social function.

- **Nietzsche**  

  The entire circle is a theatre of the will to power. Every character, including the writer and the priest, is accused of seeking influence under another name. The scarlet woman’s speech is almost a direct paraphrase of Nietzsche’s genealogy: “You want power; you merely call it something else.” The priest’s final appeal to “one Lord” is met with the writer’s counter-claim—“We are part of a god”—a late-Nietzschean or Spinozist monism that collapses transcendence into immanence.

### 3. The Writer as Existential Observer  

The newcomer discovers he is “a writer\ldots characterised by questions and explanations.” His position is closest to the existential tradition.

- **Sartre**  

  The story repeatedly stages *mauvaise foi* (bad faith). Each archetype refuses to acknowledge the contingency of his or her identity. The writer, by contrast, is the one who recognises the emptiness of the place and the emptiness inside himself. Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” is dramatised when the entity realises its own nature only after encountering the others.

- **Camus**  

  The final image—the colours washing out, the entity cast into “an obscure passage,” the “huge” emptiness—is pure absurdity. There is no resolution, no salvation, only the confrontation with the void. The laughter that earlier circulated among the archetypes is the Camusian laughter of those who have momentarily forgotten the absurd.

### 4. Love, Art, and the Question of Value  

Several characters debate the nature of love and fulfilment:

- The priest equates happiness with obedience to divine commandments (Augustinian / Thomistic).  

- The prostitute reduces it to service or lust.  

- The writer claims that artistic creation was “more satisfying than sex” and unified mind, heart and body—an almost Platonic or Romantic elevation of *poiesis*.  

- The banker and politician treat it as a by-product of power or money.

The story refuses to adjudicate. It merely shows that each definition is self-serving, leaving the reader with the same unresolved tension that the entity carries out of the cottage.

### 5. Ontological Closure  

The closing lines—“There is no heaven or hell outside us. We are part of a god”—echo two modern currents:

- **Spinoza** (and later Hegelian or process theology): God is not a transcendent judge but the totality of which we are modes.  

- **Buddhist / Madhyamaka thought**: the emptiness (*śūnyatā*) that appears at the end is not a mere absence but the ultimate nature of all appearances. The “huge” emptiness into which the entity is finally cast is both the end of the narrative and its metaphysical horizon.

### Summary  

“The House of Entities” is a late-modern allegory that recycles and compresses several of the West’s (and East’s) deepest philosophical preoccupations:

| Motif in the story              | Classical / modern parallel          |

|--------------------------------|--------------------------------------|

| Empty mirror / desired vision  | Plato’s Cave, Lacan’s Imaginary     |

| Social roles in limbo          | Dante’s *Purgatorio*, Marx’s ideology |

| Will to power under other names| Nietzsche’s genealogy               |

| Confrontation with emptiness  | Sartrean authenticity, Camus’s absurd, Buddhist emptiness |

| “We are part of a god”         | Spinozist monism                    |

The story does not resolve these traditions; it stages their collision inside a single consciousness and then dissolves that consciousness back into the void. In that sense it is less a didactic philosophical treatise than a literary dramatisation of the very questions the great thinkers spent their lives trying to answer.