The Other Ghost in Don Juan

This essay examines the narrative disjunction between Cantos VI and VII of Don Juan, the only one of eight physical removes within the poem that is unexplained. The disjunction occurs when the hero is plucked without explanation from the executioner’s hands and re-emerges outside Ismail in the company of an unlikely quartet, presenting the reader with puzzling narrative and textual anomalies. The essay suggests that for both literary and biographical reasons Byron excised a considerable section of Canto VII either at the planning stage or the sketching-out stage, resulting in a canto half the average length of preceding cantos.