“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”

“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” is a familiar song whose recurrence links a confined present to Frances’s earlier memories of the retreat’s psychedelic experience. Hummed while the guests sit together in the cellar, it becomes one of several musical cues through which Frances recalls the starlight meditation and the songs played during her session.

The song in the cellar

Frances and Tony sit beside one another in companionable silence as most of the others sit too. Napoleon alone continues to pace. No one is trying to work out the security lock on the cellar door. Into this uneasy stillness, someone hums “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; Frances thinks it is Napoleon and silently supplies the words, remembering the line about a diamond in the sky.

The song does not change the circumstances in the cellar, but it gives Frances a way to move mentally beyond them. Its gentle, recognizable tune stands against the guests’ confinement and the unresolved question of the locked door. Rather than speaking aloud, she follows the melody inward, making the song part of her private recollection.

Connection to Frances’s memories

The humming brings Frances back to the night of the starlight meditation and to her imagined sleigh ride across a starry sky with Gillian. In that remembered sequence, the stars and music belong to an earlier psychedelic experience; the song’s image of a diamond in the sky resonates with the celestial setting Frances recalls.

Frances also remembers Lars singing “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” before she first lay down on the stretcher. She begins mentally listing the other songs that played through the headphones. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” therefore enters a chain of musical recollections rather than standing alone: a sound in the cellar opens onto Frances’s remembered meditation, Gillian, the stretcher, and the soundtrack of the session.

Recurrence and significance

The episode makes the song a small but concrete bridge between the guests’ present predicament and Frances’s recollection of the retreat’s earlier altered-state experience. The narration moves from the group’s silence, through a barely identified hum, into Frances’s inwardly recalled music. That transition gives the tune its narrative force: it is at once an ordinary children’s song and a cue that gathers the novel’s star imagery and Frances’s memories into the tense cellar scene.