Partway through the novel, the translator is kidnapped and forced to continue the translation in a cell. His captor turns out to be the scholar Montalo, whose edition of "The Athenian Murders" is the only surviving copy of the work. Montalo himself had obsessed over the novel, hoping to find in it a proof of Plato's Theory of Forms. He felt that should an eidetic text, such as this novel, evoke the same ideas in each reader it would then prove that ideas have a separate, independent reality. However, Montalo finished the translation only to discover that the book proved the opposite—that the book proved his (and the translator's) reality did not exist. The translator finishes the work only to have the same realization: that they themselves are characters in "The Athenian Murders", which was written by a colleague of Plato named Philotextus as a way to incorporate Plato's theory of knowledge while criticizing the philosophical lifestyle.