The Symbolism of Shadows in The City and Its Uncertain Walls

What Are Shadows in the Novel?

In The City and Its Uncertain Walls, shadows are not mere optical effects but literal, living extensions of a person. They possess their own consciousness, voice, will, and even a limited lifespan. When the narrator chooses to enter the walled town, the Gatekeeper forces him to abandon his shadow at the threshold. The separation is violent and physical: the shadow is “ripped apart” from the body, instantly becoming a shabby, trembling figure “like a pair of discarded old boots.” This act establishes the shadow as the novel’s most concrete symbol for the soul, the alter ego, or the part of the self that must be sacrificed to inhabit an imaginary world.

The evidence in the text is unambiguous. In Chapter 9 (numbered Chapter 10 in the EPUB), the Gatekeeper tells the narrator: “You can’t step inside the wall with a shadow. You either leave him here or give up on going inside.” The shadow trembles in fear, struggles briefly, and is then forcibly detached. The Gatekeeper later dismisses shadows as “useless,” claiming they have a “big mouth” and can do nothing on their own. Yet the narrative consistently undermines this dismissive view: the shadow proves to be the narrator’s most perceptive guide, his moral compass, and the only character who correctly diagnoses the town’s fundamental nature.

Where Shadows Recur and How Their Meaning Changes

1. The Narrator’s Shadow: From Discarded Appendage to Crucial Guide

The narrator’s shadow first appears as a frightened, helpless being during the separation scene. Over subsequent visits, the shadow grows weaker, thinner, and more pallid, “coughing painfully at times.” The Gatekeeper allows the narrator to meet his shadow in a special enclosure—a liminal space between the town and the outside world. During these encounters, the shadow’s role shifts dramatically from passive victim to active truth-teller.

In Chapter 14 (EPUB Chapter 15), the shadow warns: “Shadows forcibly ripped apart from the body don’t live very long. All the shadows who preceded me in the enclosure passed away, one after the other. Just like the beasts in the winter.” This establishes the mortality of shadows and creates a ticking clock for the narrator’s choice.

By Chapter 16 (EPUB Chapter 17), the shadow has become a strategist. He argues that the town is “full of made-up stories” and that the narrator must escape through the southern pool. He delivers his most radical hypothesis: “Maybe what’s in the world outside is the real girl, and what’s here is merely a shadow.” The shadow is now the voice of critical reasoning, questioning the town’s reality from within.

In Chapter 20 (EPUB Chapter 21), the shadow fully articulates his theory: the walled town is “a land of shadows, where shadows gather,” and the people exiled outside are the true humans living on “false memories.” The old dreams the narrator reads are “echoes of the minds left behind by real people”—dangerous emotions like sadness, jealousy, and love that the town collects and seals. The narrator’s role as Dream Reader is to calm these echoes “because only a real human can do so.”

Finally, in Chapter 24 (EPUB Chapter 25), during the escape attempt, the wall itself speaks and tries to block them. The shadow commands: “Don’t listen to it. And don’t look at it. It’s just an illusion. The town is showing us an illusion.” The shadow teaches the narrator that the wall is not absolute—it can be passed through by trusting the heart and rejecting fear. The shadow’s trajectory thus moves from weakness to wisdom, from abandonment to indispensable guidance.

2. The Girl’s Shadow: The Lost Self

The girl in the walled town (the Dream Reader) has no living shadow. When the narrator asks about her shadow, she says: “I’m sure he died long ago. Shadows separated from the body are like plants without roots. They don’t live long.” Later, in Chapter 9 (EPUB Chapter 10), she elaborates: “The dark heart is sent somewhere far away, and finally it loses its life.” She describes the death of a shadow as leaving behind “stillness”—an eternal quietude.

This absence is crucial. The girl’s shadowlessness marks her as fully integrated into the town’s system. Unlike the narrator, who retains memories of the outside and a dying shadow that still speaks, the girl has no such link to another world. She is, in the shadow’s hypothesis, perhaps a shadow herself who does not know she is one. The narrator confesses in Chapter 22 (Chapter 23 in the outline) that he met “her shadow-self outside the wall” when he was sixteen and fell in love. The Dream Reader responds that her shadow “died long ago” and insists she is not that girl. This ambiguity—is the girl in the town real or a shadow?—remains unresolved, making her a figure of profound loss and uncertainty.

3. Mr. Koyasu: The Ghost Without a Shadow

In Chapter 37 (EPUB Chapter 38), the head librarian Mr. Koyasu reveals he is a ghost, having died of a heart attack while walking in the mountains. His lack of a shadow confirms his supernatural state. He quotes Psalm 144:4: “People are like a breath; their days are like a fleeting shadow.” He tells the narrator: “I, dead now, don’t even have a shadow anymore.” The implication is clear: to possess a shadow is to be alive; to lose it is to be dead—or, in the walled town’s case, to be trapped in a liminal state between life and death.

Mr. Koyasu’s observation also works in reverse. He can see that the narrator “once lost his shadow,” because the narrator carries the mark of that experience. Losing a shadow, in this novel, leaves a permanent trace that the dead (or the truly perceptive) can recognize.

4. The Shadowless Town: Collective Absence

A defining feature of the walled town is that none of its residents cast shadows. In Chapter 63 (Chapter 64 in the outline), the narrator observes this directly: “No one in the town casts a shadow.” Earlier, in Chapter 9 (EPUB Chapter 10), the girl explains: “In this town, people lack shadows. Once you get rid of your shadow, you really understand, for the first time, that shadows have their own weight.” The absence of shadows is presented as a normalized condition—the residents have forgotten what they lost. This collective shadowlessness symbolizes the town’s fundamental nature as a place of exile from full humanity. The residents are incomplete beings, living in a static eternity where growth, change, and authentic connection are impossible.

The Shadow’s Core Meanings

The Soul and the Self

The most straightforward reading of the shadow symbol is that it represents the soul. The Gatekeeper dismisses the soul as “worthless,” saying: “I’m finding I believe less and less in the soul, crammed into that pathetic vessel. Sometimes I think it’d be best to douse it with oil, too, like the body and burn it all up.” But the narrative repeatedly validates the shadow’s importance. Without his shadow, the narrator loses access to doubt, self-awareness, and the desire to return to reality. The shadow is the part of him that remembers the outside world and insists on its priority.

The Alter Ego

The shadow also functions as a double or alter ego. It is “the other self” that accompanies a person through life. The narrator feels guilt after abandoning his shadow: “I did feel a little guilty. Unavoidable, I suppose, since I was getting rid of my alter ego.” The shadow knows things the narrator does not—it has investigated the town, gathered information from visitors, and formulated hypotheses. It is both a part of the narrator and a separate being with its own perspective.

The Cost of Entering the Walled Town

The separation of shadow from body is the price of admission to the walled town. This cost is irreversible: once separated, the shadow dies, and the narrator can never fully return to his former self. The walled town demands this sacrifice because it cannot tolerate the full, complex reality of a human being. To live in the town is to live without the dark heart, without doubt, without the messy contradictions that define real life. The shadow, as the bearer of these unwanted qualities, must be left behind.

The Truth-Teller

Ironically, the discarded shadow becomes the most reliable truth-teller in the novel. While the town is “full of made-up stories” and the Gatekeeper actively deceives, the shadow speaks plainly about its own mortality and the town’s illusions. It tells the narrator: “This town is not perfect. Even the wall isn’t perfect. Nothing’s perfect in this world. Everything has its weak point.” The shadow, despite being weak and dying, possesses a clarity that the narrator lacks while inside the town.

Connection to Major Themes

The shadow symbol directly connects to several central themes of the novel:

• Identity and the shadow: The shadow raises the question of whether identity is singular or divided. If the narrator can be separated from his shadow, which version is the “real” self? The shadow suggests the answer is neither—both parts are needed for wholeness.

• Reality vs. illusion: The shadow’s hypothesis that the walled town is a “land of shadows” and the outside world contains the real people upends the narrator’s (and the reader’s) understanding of what is real. The shadow embodies the possibility that everything in the town is an illusion.

• Love and loss: The girl’s dead shadow represents the loss of her external self. The narrator’s love for her is complicated by the question of which version of her is real—the shadow-self outside the wall (who vanished) or the Dream Reader inside (who does not remember him).

• Isolation and connection: The shadow enclosure is a liminal space where connection is still possible. The narrator visits his shadow there, and their conversations are the most honest in the novel. The shadow’s eventual death represents the final severing of the narrator’s connection to his former life.

• Memory and forgetting: The old dreams that the narrator reads are “echoes of the minds left behind by real people.” These dreams are dangerous emotions that the town tries to seal away. The shadow explains that the narrator’s role as Dream Reader is to calm these echoes “through empathy.” The shadow thus connects memory, emotion, and the work of being human.

Study Questions

1. What does the narrator’s decision to abandon his shadow reveal about his character at the beginning of the novel?

The narrator’s willingness to abandon his shadow shows that he is driven by longing—specifically, the desire to reunite with the girl. He does not fully understand the cost of this choice. He feels guilt but proceeds anyway. The decision also reveals his passivity: the Gatekeeper instructs him, and he obeys without resistance. Throughout the novel, the narrator must learn to become more active in his own life, a lesson his shadow embodies by urging him to act. The shadow represents the part of the narrator that is capable of decisive choice, which he has suppressed.

2. Why does the shadow’s hypothesis about the town being “a land of shadows” matter for understanding the novel’s central ambiguity?

The shadow’s hypothesis matters because it introduces radical uncertainty into the narrative. If the walled town is a land of shadows, then everyone the narrator meets there—including the Dream Reader—might be a shadow who does not know their true nature. This reverses the town’s official story and aligns with the girl’s earlier claim that her “real self” lives in the walled town while her outer self is a shadow. The hypothesis cannot be proven or disproven within the story, which is precisely the point: the novel asks readers to live with the ambiguity. The shadow’s theory also explains why the town suppresses memory and emotion: those are traces of the real human beings who were exiled.

3. How does Mr. Koyasu’s ghostly state—having no shadow—redefine the meaning of the shadow symbol in the novel’s second half?

Mr. Koyasu’s lack of a shadow establishes a direct equivalence: no shadow equals death. This redefines the shadow as a sign of life itself. When Mr. Koyasu quotes scripture comparing human life to “a fleeting shadow,” he means that shadows are precious precisely because they are temporary. The narrator, who once lost his shadow, now sees that having a shadow is what connects him to the living world. Mr. Koyasu urges the narrator to “cherish your life. Since you still have a dark shadow with you.” This reframes the entire symbol: the shadow is not a burden to be discarded but a gift that marks the bearer as fully human and fully alive.

4. If the narrator and his shadow are reunited at the end, does that imply the walled town’s reality has collapsed? What evidence supports your reading?

The novel does not show a definitive reunion. In Chapter 24 (EPUB Chapter 25), the narrator and his shadow attempt to escape together, passing through the wall as if through “a soft layer of jelly.” The shadow tells the narrator to trust his heart and not be afraid. However, the novel’s ending remains ambiguous. In the narrator’s dreamlike regression in Chapter 61 (Chapter 62 in the outline), he notices his shadow is missing and the girl whispers that they are “nothing more than someone else’s shadows.” This suggests that the boundary between self and shadow, real and unreal, has become permeable. The evidence does not confirm a literal reunion; instead, it points to a transformation in the narrator’s understanding. He no longer sees the shadow as a separate being to be discarded or reclaimed, but as an inseparable part of himself—one that cannot be permanently abandoned without losing his humanity.