“Strange and unnatural position”

Strange and unnatural position is a recurring expression whose significance lies in its change of context: it first appears as the supposedly neutral wording of a newspaper account of the Unnamed protagonist’s imagined revenge, where he treats it as a joke. Elsewhere, closely related language describes abuse by officers. The phrase thus sits between official description, victim testimony, and the protagonist’s fantasies, exposing how language can make violence sound both reportable and absurd.

The Newspaper Phrase

In a cell-bound fantasy, the Unnamed protagonist imagines overpowering two officers and arranging them in a humiliating position. The next day, in the imagined continuation, he reads a newspaper report describing how they were found in a strange and unnatural position. He laughs at the wording, repeating it with satisfaction. The joke depends on the gap between a restrained, almost bureaucratic description and the outrageous scene he has invented; the report’s formal phrasing becomes part of his revenge fantasy.

The episode is not presented as an event that has actually happened. It belongs to the protagonist’s interior sequence of imagined retaliation against police whom he believes can abuse their authority without consequence. Earlier, while furious in his cell, he paces and curses the officers; here, the fantasy gives that anger a staged public aftermath, complete with a newspaper account whose wording he can savor. The phrase makes imagined humiliation feel momentarily like public acknowledgment, while the laughter marks the scene as the protagonist’s private construction.

Police Violence and the Phrase’s Reversal

The phrase’s effect changes in the account of Mrs. Haagstromm’s assault. There, the narration describes the officers’ acts as taking place in strange and unnatural ways, within a report of severe violence and its lasting consequences. This is a close verbal echo, not the same full expression or the same scene: the phrase that amused the Unnamed protagonist in his fantasy now sits beside the account of a victim’s suffering. Its tonal register cannot contain that suffering, and the contrast makes the earlier joke more unsettling.

The surrounding narrative establishes why the protagonist’s imagined reversal carries such force for him. He recalls being arrested on suspicion while lost in an unfamiliar part of the city, despite showing identification, and describes his subsequent questioning and confinement as confusing and threatening. His later rage is directed at police power and perceived impunity. The phrase does not prove his imagined retaliation occurred; instead, it shows how he converts grievance into a fantasy in which the officers, rather than their victims, become the subject of a public report.

A Repeated Language of Judgment

The same pattern of imagined reversal appears when the Unnamed protagonist pictures confronting Fred in court and watching him be removed after a beating. In another imagined proceeding, he listens as psychiatrists characterize two officers as emotionally disturbed and unfit to serve, and relishes the possibility that they will be confined. These scenes do not repeat the full expression, but they extend its central inversion: police officers who have wielded power are recast as exposed, judged, and subject to institutional control.

The phrase therefore links a private fantasy of revenge to the book’s broader concern with public and institutional naming. A newspaper’s description, a victim’s account, and a psychiatric assessment each frame conduct for an audience, but they do not carry the same authority or moral weight. By making the supposedly odd arrangement of the officers the punch line of his imagined report, the protagonist claims control over the language that would otherwise describe police conduct. The result is deliberately unstable: the wording offers him comic satisfaction, while its echo beside the account of Mrs. Haagstromm’s injuries reveals the violence and suffering that the joke cannot erase.