18-21 (ABC)

This reading made me think that this novel was not completed at the time of the author’s death. I won’t assume that Bulgakov didn’t intend to write of a magic cream that turns Margarita and her maid into witches who ride naked through the sky, but the story gets even weirder than it has before and seems to go nowhere. We have always said the symbolism of the sun and the moon is prevalent in The Master and Margarita, and I now see how powerful the moon can be. Near the end of her ride, Margarita passes “a pool of quivering electric lights” (260). She seems to have slipped on her broom and then righted herself, but by then the pool has disappeared. Within just a few sentences Margarita is “alone with the moon” and “the moonlight washed over her body.” The fact that the body of lights was first described as a pool, that Margarita eventually reaches a pool and goes for a swim, and that the moonlight is described in a liquid-manner remind of Ivan Nikolayevich’s “baptism” when he randomly jumps in the Moskva River (57). If we are assuming that sunlight is good and moonlight evil, what does it mean for Margarita to baptized by evil? We know she has turned into a witch, literally, but when she helps to comfort the child left in the building she has ransacked, one must recognize that she retains some good qualities (259).
-ABC