Byron's tactic of seduce and desert within the narrative framework and that of the story itself in "Don Juan," helps to achieve an awareness of how literature works on the mind of the reader. Through betrayal at different moments, a sequencing of defamiliarization occurs, which entails destroying meaning of an already established concept, object, person, etc., and wiping the slate clean for new beginnings.

Within the narrative framework, there is a betrayal on the subject of Southey. The poem begins with a zealous, comedic criticism of Southey: "Bob Southey! You're a poet - Poet Laureate/ . . . rather insolent, you know" (Byron ln.1/17). It is footnoted that the first line is expressive of the fact that Southey, being a poet-laureate had given up his radicalism. The sarcastic tone itself is enough to understand the direct, insulting commentary in the narrative voice. However, at the end of the first canto, the narrator bursts forth with a shocking revelation: "I can't help putting in my claim to praise; / The four first rhymes are Southey's every line- / For God's sake, reader, take them not for mine!" (Byron, ln. 1774-6). With these lines, the reader is not only momentarily confused, but the reader is directly addressed with a demand. With this seeming betrayal of expectation established at the beginning of the poem, there is a demand for liberty of change.

Don Juan's betrayal of the reader in the story itself helps to reiterate and echo this liberty of change. The reader is seduced into a world where Don Juan's love is strong and lasting for Julia, which becomes symbolic of the whole idea of an established order. The nature of the second love is recognition of an innocent and true renewal of experience: "they were / All in all to each other . . . first love, / she was all which pure ignorance allows, / and flew to her young mate like a young bird; / and, never having dreamt of falsehood, she / Had not one word to say of constancy" (Byron, ln. 1507/1511/1517-1520). Haidee is the symbol of new beginnings and the transient quality of each experience, without latching on to ideas of constancy and changelessness.

The narrator's betrayal of the reader is effective in that it questions how we latch onto opinion; faced with an initial view point, it is strange to alter that safe, static structure, which has been established. Don Juan's betrayal of the reader, in which he forgets his first love, works on the reader in a different way, because we are successfully brought over to the other side, in which new beginnings are embraced and do not necessarily detract from the past relationship. However, this is a fictional, fantasy world, where the old love is placed securely in the nunnery and the new one is on some foreign shore; a clean break, which does not happen so often in the world of Byron's real life, and is therefore left to say:

I hate inconstancy - I loathe, detest,
Abhor, condemn, abjure the mortal make
Of such quicksilver clay that in his breast
No permanent foundation can be laid;
Love, constant love, has been my constant guest,
And yet last night, being at a masquerade,
I saw the prettiest creature, fresh from Milan,
Which gave me some sensations like a villian.
(Byron, ln. 1665-72)

It would all be so much easier if things remained the same, "twould save us many a heartache, many a shilling" (Byron, ln. 1701).

Anne Wullschlager