Ignorance, impotence, and failure are among the key preoccupations of the book.
The unnamed narrator of Limping to an Intellectual Impasse is in a state of uncertainty and collapse. He is in a position where he has neither a fixed identity nor an absolute self. He is conscious only of doubt.
He knows he's lost his vitality and creativity (when younger, he wrote a novel that launched him into brief success). Now, in the decay of age, he's delving into his past in a desperate attempt to unearth the reason for his ruin. In a notebook, he writes down the many scraps of memory, the many obsessions, the obstacles and deceptions, the lies and beliefs from which he has never been able to free himself. He has come to believe that his fate depends on writing the interrogation of his consciousness, and that, in doing so, such a confession will allow him to enter a new, disabused life.
Wracked by pain and anguish, both physical and psychological, and in a state of delirium, the story of his interrogation is told in the first-person monologue of a highly fragmented nature; for whoever suffers much necessarily needs to understand the malady that affects one. At times patient and rational, at times raving and delusional, the narrator traces the meandering of his anfractuous mind in an attempt to negate the past. But no explanation can make sense for a man so revolted and so deceived. Indeed, nothing is even worth discussing at length. His exploration is a movement of constraint and annihilation. Memories stab at him from a vast silence and emptiness. He is forever crying out in bewilderment and anguish as he struggles to cope with obscene dementia that hurls him inexplicably to a still greater perplexity and atrophy.
As he awaits death, in a kind of purgatory, he writes these many memories and thoughts in a notebook. He is situated on the brink of annihilation, and his writing is a last, desperate attempt at expiation. His mind moves by taking up one topic by association with another, only to return to those subjects that obsess him. Indeed, he can only trace the meandering of his mind back and forth through time. But failure, always the narrator's double, is inevitable. He has been trying to speak the impossibility of his existence and to give this impossibility a voice from the depths where language fails. From here, he takes the final position and refuses. The only possible outcome is silence.