They know how they believe that they believe that they know

“They know how they believe that they believe that they know” is a compact statement of recursive, uncertain knowledge: belief is nested inside belief, while knowledge appears at both ends without ever becoming secure. Its placement beside the wailing over Jaun makes the phrase both a reflection on how people claim to know and a refrain for a community responding to loss.

Wording and Structure

The sentence loops through two verbs, “know” and “believe,” arranging them so that each apparent certainty depends on another mental act. The first “know” governs a belief about a belief; the final “know” is itself enclosed within that chain. Rather than resolving the relation between belief and knowledge, the expression makes the reader traverse it repeatedly, with each turn qualifying what seemed settled.

That recursive construction belongs to a text that presents writing and interpretation as unstable practices. Its manuscript-like document is described as a “polyhedron of scripture,” shaped by accumulated marks, revisions, variant readings, gaps, and signs that may be read in different orders. The passage asks who wrote it and under what conditions, while emphasizing that the people, objects, and spellings involved were continually changing. Against this background, the expression’s nested syntax is not a detachable maxim about certainty: it reproduces, in miniature, the work of trying to interpret a text whose evidence never stands entirely still.

The Document and Its Uncertain Signs

The discussion of the document makes uncertainty tangible. Its inscriptions include an initial associated with Earwicker, a puzzling sign that can function as a warning that the following words may be taken in any order, and a serpentine mark that seems to coil and swell under the pressure of the writer’s hand. Revisions, omissions, repetitions, and misalignments draw attention to the material page rather than allowing it to disappear behind a single, authoritative reading.

A separate investigation of a document finds no punctuation in its original script. When its reverse is held against a lit rush, the paper’s wounds and punctures become legible as a graded series of requests to stop; those marks, in turn, help investigators identify the people connected with them. Knowledge here is neither simply present nor wholly absent. It emerges through an uncertain process of reading physical traces, comparing them, and deciding what they can establish—a procedure echoed by the expression’s repeated movement between belief and knowledge.

Placement in Jaun’s Departure

The expression appears after Jaun’s final words and his departure. The daughters who had gathered to cheer or curse him see him carried away; their response turns to wailing, while the scene’s language presents their farewell as both grief and a collective performance. The phrase follows as a description of what the mourners do: they know how they believe, and believe that they know. The construction makes their shared response legible without claiming that the feeling beneath it is simple or fully understood.

Its position gives the line an emotional as well as an epistemic force. Jaun is gone from the assembled women, and their lament supplies no stable explanation that would undo that separation. Instead, the sentence catches a community in the act of sustaining its own account of what it knows. Its recursive form leaves certainty circling inside belief, while the wail that follows keeps the loss present.

Narrative Significance

The expression connects the novel’s difficult documents with the social act of mourning. In both settings, people interpret signs under conditions that frustrate complete certainty: a mark may be a clue, a letter may preserve several hands and minds, and a public farewell may express grief while becoming a scene watched and narrated by others. The line does not announce a final solution to these interpretive problems. It makes their recurring structure audible, turning the claim to know into a loop that must be read again.