It is as if you are meandering through a thick, hazy jungle while reading The Name of the Rose. I'm always challenged by Eco's intricate story of murder, monasticism, and medieval study over the nature of truth and how elusive it actually is. The labyrinthine library itself, which is a metaphor for knowledge as well as how it is ultimately warped, subjective, and guarded, lies at the heart of it all. The monks conceal books, which got me to thinking: How often do we conceal information—not simply to keep it safe but also to maintain our own control over what other people know?
William of Baskerville seems like an idealistic representation of the Enlightenment, someone who believes that truth can be discovered with the correct instruments—logic, observation, deduction. But even William, with all his intellect, never quite gets everything right. He interprets and misinterprets; his search for truth is an unending spiral. I can’t help but relate this to my own frustrations with understanding the world—there's always a feeling that I’ve missed something, that I’ve come close to grasping meaning but it slipped away, just out of reach. It’s like trying to hold water in your hands.
And then there is Jorge of Burgos. I find him terrifying not only for his evil deeds but also because he epitomizes an intellectual tyranny that I occasionally witness in myself and others—an obsession with maintaining the purity of knowledge and suppressing anything that contradicts accepted truths. Jorge burns books because he feels that certain knowledge is dangerous. This gets me thinking about censorship, but also self-censorship: how often do I avoid facing uncomfortable truths because they threaten the neat narrative I've built for myself? Jorge's fanaticism reflects this tension: the fear that if I acknowledge a different perspective, it might shatter the whole system I've built?
The theme of interpretation is key to the novel and to life. Whether it’s reading a text, analyzing a situation, or trying to understand another person, we are constantly interpreting. Sometimes, I feel paralyzed by this—there’s no definitive answer, no singular truth, just layers of meaning stacked on top of one another. Still, I continue to attempt, like William, to make sense of it all. Perhaps that is the whole idea of seeking the truth—that meaning is something we make as much as it is something we discover—rather than worrying about having the answer. Life is a constant exercise in hermeneutics.
There’s a scene where William talks about laughter and how it destabilizes authority, how laughter is a form of liberation. It struck a chord with me, because humor has always been a way for me to cope with uncertainty. Whenever things become excessively intricate or daunting, a lighthearted moment or joke helps alleviate the tension. Laughter reminds me that sometimes it's good to not know, breaking the gravity of finding the truth. I wonder whether laughter is truth in and of itself, a liberation from the weight of understanding everything all the time.
As the narrator, Adso gives the book a distinct emotional feel. I can relate to his innocence and his curiosity about the world, especially in regards to his friendship with the nameless peasant girl. The combination of his religious guilt and his longing for her has a really genuine feel to it. That tension between desire and restraint—it’s a struggle I think many of us face, especially when we try to reconcile our emotional selves with the ideologies or systems we’ve internalized. The fact that we never learn her name feels significant, like she’s more of an idea than a person, a symbol of everything we long for but can't quite grasp or articulate.
Sometimes, I wonder if the novel is Eco’s way of saying that we will never fully understand anything, that the pursuit of knowledge, though noble, is ultimately incomplete. The truth is fragmented, splintered into a thousand pieces, each one just a part of the whole. That’s both liberating and terrifying. It’s like standing at the edge of a cliff, peering into the vastness below—you’re drawn to the depth, to the mystery, but also afraid of what might happen if you fall in.
Ultimately, The Name of the Rose feels like a reflection of the human condition. We seek knowledge, we construct elaborate systems to contain it, and we interpret the world through the lens of our own limitations. But there’s always something we miss, something that escapes us, like the murderer who evades William’s perfect reasoning. And perhaps that's alright. Perhaps there is beauty in the ambiguity, in understanding that truth is a mosaic we construct piece by piece, with each of us adding our own erroneous interpretations.
Like a labyrinth, life is full of unexpected turns and dead ends. Like William, there are moments when we meander through it in quest of clarification and come away with more questions than when we began. But isn't that what it is to be human?