The hours of the dog and the wolf

The hours of the dog and the wolf — the twilight interval known in French as "entre chien et loup" — is a temporal motif that recurs throughout the novel as the charged boundary between day and night. The phrase names the moment when the familiar world of the domestic and the human begins to dissolve into something older and wilder, a threshold that belongs fully to neither the tame dog nor the predatory wolf. In the narrator's experience, this liminal time is not merely a poetic description of dusk but the precise condition under which the ordinary rules of her life suspend themselves, opening a space where the animal and the untamed can appear. The motif gathers the novel's deepest concerns — the instability of the human, the proximity of the wild, the erosion of the boundary between sanity and madness — into a single image of a time that is neither one thing nor the other.