His first thought upon waking was: He woke up in a room that was not his own.

It is probably a bit early for remarks, but two remarks need to be made about this. The first is that, strictly speaking, the phrase first thought is a misnomer here. Even for the so-called omniscient narrator, it is impossible to say what happens inside of one's mind in the first slow moments of wakefulness, before the heavy matrices of language and society and identity settle down onto the awoken, when it may be that the psyche is thrown open to possibility. We will not assume this to be the case, but if it were, it might be speculated that in that moment, his true first thought, transcribed into our language, was something like: Here I am in a room. Natural light comes in through the window. Morning light on a light hardwood floor. White walls. A house in the country? The bed is queen-size, soft but not too soft, with comfortable sheets. The curtains are white, there is a closed wooden door past my feet and to my left, with an old-fashioned metal knob, door and knob both painted white, and the pillows emit a soft, agreeably crunchy sound when I move my head on them ever so slightly. This must be my room. I have a awakened in a pleasant room and therefore to a pleasant life. On a rocky peninsula, with a lighthouse nearby, whitewashed with a spiral staircase on the outside? This day will be a good day. If one of the many patterns of neural activity that could account for the thought this must be my room did blink briefly in his mind, it was an illusion, though an illusion of the truth, as we will see.

The other remark is that he was not in any sense a neurotic or pretentious or self-centered man, and was certainly not accustomed to thinking of himself in third-person past-tense narrative, and was very fleetingly—again, unlinguistically—annoyed for having conceived of himself as if (the irony here is unavoidable) he were the protagonist of a work of fiction.

Beginning, first draft