In the opening episode of 10:04, the author/narrator discusses a conversation with his agent in which he plans the development of his novel: “I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously…I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.” Like Whitman, Lerner’s novel (and that of his protagonist) are tied inextricably together with the landscape, people, structures of the city. In so doing, Lerner (and his protagonist) accomplish something similar to Whitman in that this novel creates a space in which to meditate on the intersection between time, art, fiction and physicality.
However, the nature of time, art, fiction and physical presence in Lerner’s novel are addressed from a perspective that, though noticeably “Whitmanian,” has been transfused with a distinctly (post-)modern self-awareness. Thus the movement from crisis to ecstasy and resolution in Whitman becomes, for Lerner, a movement “from irony to sincerity” that is realized not only in the novel’s content (the narrator is an author contemplating the value of not only his writing but the art of writing in his historical context–both the mundane and meaningful) but also in its form (the novel is transposed with meta-fictional displays from “the author” who ironically becomes the fictional narrator’s fictional narrator).
When the narrator introduces the second section of the novel, there is also a divide introduced between “the author” of the story-within-the-story, the narrator of this story, and the narrator in the novel that in a way reflects the divide between Whitman’s all-containing “I,” his critical voice, and the “real me” Whitman. Section three re-orients the reader in the immediate action of the novel, but as these immediate events retroactively blur with the fictional excerpt of fiction, the intersection between time, fiction, reality, and physicality becomes especially important.
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