Kobo Abe begins his novel, The Woman in the Dunes, in an unnamed village where the inhabitants trick the protagonist, Junpei Niki, into go down a steep slope. rope ladder in a sand hole. The ladder leads Niki to prison and its disappearance causes Niki to panic. Although a simple tool, the rope ladder continues to appear in the novel physically and in Niki's desires. The rope ladder in Abe's Woman in the Dunes is a multi-layered symbol used to intensify the reader's understanding of Niki's imprisonment, her feelings of hope, and her quest for freedom. Upon waking up in the hole, Niki asks the woman about the ladder that "[went] missing from where it was the night before" (46). Niki's means of escape are gone. The scale, however, has apparently not disappeared; the rope was removed by the village leaders. By removing the ladder, they force him to stay in the sand hole. Although Niki “pushed his arms into the sand, groping for [the ladder],” he could not find it and “he never found it, no matter how much he searched” (47). . Niki's imprisonment is not an accident, and the loss of the ladder underlines this. The ladder plays a vital role in Niki's imprisonment because “[he] can't get out of a place like this without a ladder” (49). His decision to go down trapped him with an anonymous woman. The couple faces a Sisyphean task; no matter how much sand they move, it quickly returns, filling the holes; billions of 1/8 mm grains of sand pour down the slopes, erasing all previous work. Niki frequently notes the size of the sand, revealing an important choice by the author. Abe adds a distinctive aspect of the character, Niki's obsession with the individual, to intensify Niki's feelings of imprisonment. Beak...... middle of paper...... stuck in the hole because he just couldn't escape, or because he let the ladder determine his mental freedom ? Perhaps Niki was trapped simply because he chose to focus solely on scale. Abe creates an interesting juxtaposition when he uses the ladder to represent freedom and imprisonment, two opposing ideas. Yet this juxtaposition makes the reader wonder if the things that liberate him also imprison him. Does having a back and forth in life, opportunities, good times, abilities, cause them to become trapped? By using the ladder as a symbol, Abe opens the door to bigger questions about imprisonment, hope, and freedom, while strengthening the reader's understanding of The Woman in the Dunes. Word count: 1,500 works cited Abe, Kobo. The Woman in the Dunes. Trans. E. Dale Saunders. New York: vintage, 1964. Print.