ABSTRACT
The title of Broch’s key novel fits into the series constituted by the Demons, Magic Mountain and Carnival, and continued by Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita, Doderer’s Demons and Hamvas’s Carnival, capturing an activity situated in between the wakeful and sleeping states, recalling a permanent carnival night, thus having a particularly liminal, unreal character. Beyond the title alluding to activity, there are concrete human beings who are engaged in it; who are or act as sleepwalkers. Broch has important precedents in identifying contemporaries as sleepwalkers. They include Heraclitus, classical prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah, calling for watchfulness, or Gabriel Tarde (Szakolczai and Thomassen 2011: 53-4).
