From Surgipelago, the Beach Surgery encyclopedia
The Pacemaker's Sovereignty—Authority, Refusal, and Heartbeat as Narrative Constraint
This is a scholarly work examining the pacemaker motif. For the motif itself, see Heart out of whack.
Okonkwo's dissertation argues that Leif's external pacemaker—the blinking red diode governing his heartbeat—encodes a paradox of authority and refusal that operates simultaneously at three levels: the fictional (Leif's bodily dependency), the author's practice (Smith's unfinishable structure), and the reader's interpretive consent.
The pacemaker creates what Okonkwo calls a sovereignty without agency: Leif depends on it to live, yet the rhythm is not his own. When Katita removes it in Chapter 6, his heart becomes "stronger"—his own rhythm restored—yet the wings that erupt are the same catastrophe that crashes him. The freedom kills him. Okonkwo reads this as no accident but a trap within the trap: volition purchased only by destruction.
The thesis connects this to Smith's own method. *Antinomicity*'s structure—the imposed triptych, the numbered chapters, the recurring characters—permits narrative freedom within constraint, yet the constraint cannot be refused without abandoning coherence. The glitch (the unfinishable seam) becomes the author's pacemaker: an external, inhuman rhythm that keeps the work alive even as it prevents resolution.
Drawing on Foucault, Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, and post-colonial medical-sovereignty theory, Okonkwo extends the reading across global adaptations, examining how cultures localize the pacemaker as symbol of colonialism, gender, and forced care.