How Memoirs Found in a Bathtub Turns Reality into an Unsolvable Puzzle

The Madness Begins

There’s nothing like a good, old-fashioned existential crisis wrapped in bureaucratic paranoia.

That’s exactly what Stanisław Lem’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub serves up—except instead of a sip, you’re drowning in it.

Imagine Kafka on LSD, Orwell laughing at his own nightmares, and Philip K. Dick staring at them all, confused.

This book doesn’t just make you question reality. It shreds reality, feeds it through a malfunctioning paper shredder, then scatters the remains like confetti.

There’s a plot. Allegedly. But don’t expect a neat resolution—this isn’t a Hollywood movie, and Lem isn’t here to hold your trembling hand.

About the Man Who Wrote This Literary Mindquake

Stanisław Lem was a Polish science fiction writer, satirist, and professional mind-wrecker. He didn’t just write sci-fi; he rewired it.

He gave us Solaris, His Master’s Voice, and of course, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub—a book so drenched in paranoia it makes Orwell’s 1984 feel like a summer picnic.

The Story (Or Whatever This Is)

A nameless agent—our protagonist—is thrown into a labyrinthine, post-apocalyptic underground facility called “The Building.”

Civilization is dead, history is wiped, and all that’s left is the remains of a government project, where paranoia isn’t a bug, it’s the whole damn system.

No one tells him what his mission is. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the mission is the mission. Maybe the mission is madness itself.

Every interaction leads to more confusion, every command contradicts the last. The only certainty? There is none.

This isn’t just a novel. It’s a literary experiment that makes you feel like a rat trapped in a maze where the walls are made of paper, covered in nonsense reports, and set on fire just for fun.

1. The Plot Eats Itself (And You Along With It)

You know those Russian dolls? Open one up, and there’s another inside. Keep going, and at some point, you start wondering if it ever ends.

That’s Memoirs Found in a Bathtub.

Every answer leads to another question. Every piece of logic falls apart the moment you hold onto it. You don’t read this book; you survive it.

Table 1: What Happens When You Try to Understand the Book

Action	Result
Read first chapter	Intrigued, slightly amused.
Read halfway	Confused but committed.
Finish book	Reality is questionable.
Re-read book	Who are you? Where are you? Is this even real?

2. Bureaucracy Is the Real Horror Show

Lem takes bureaucratic absurdity and pumps it so full of steroids its veins burst, spraying red tape in every direction.

Every character is tangled in paperwork like a fly in a spider’s web, drowning in investigations that go nowhere, crushed under the weight of rules that contradict themselves like two drunks arguing over who gets the last drop of whiskey.

They claw through forms that demand forms for the forms, signatures that require approvals that require signatures from departments that don’t even exist.

There’s no Big Brother here—just a million little bastard brothers, each clutching their own memo like a holy scripture, armed with agendas sharper than switchblades, grinning as they enforce nonsense protocols that shift like quicksand.

If you’ve ever dealt with a government job, tried to cancel an internet plan, or filled out a tax form only to be told you owe money for their mistake, while some idiot asks for three copies of your request before lifting a finger, this book will start to make more sense to you.

3. The Philosophy of Madness: Stoicism & Utilitarianism in the Chaos

What do you do when the world stops making sense? You can scream, drink yourself into oblivion, or—if you’re feeling fancy—turn to philosophy.

Stoicism: Endure the Insanity

The main character, lost in the Building’s labyrinth, is the ultimate Stoic without knowing it. He doesn’t control the system, the rules, or the absurdity of it all. But he trudges on, mission or no mission, because what else is there to do? Like Seneca trapped in a Kafka novel.

Utilitarianism: The Greater Good of Nothing

The system in the Building runs on its own momentum. Orders exist to be followed, even if they mean nothing. If bureaucracy is a religion, this is its holy temple.

It’s utilitarianism turned inside out: not the greatest good for the greatest number, but maximum suffering for maximum confusion.

Table 2: Applying Philosophy to Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

Philosophy	Application in the Book
Stoicism	The protagonist endures the absurdity without breaking.
Utilitarianism	The system functions purely for itself, without purpose.
Existentialism	The only meaning is what you make of it (and good luck with that).

4. A Literary Middle Finger to Narrative Structure

This book is a maze with no exit, a nightmare with no wake-up call. Traditional storytelling? That’s for amateurs, for people who think arcs have to be neat, like the lines on a businessman’s suit.

Lem takes one look at that idea, gives it the finger, and laughs in your face.

Beginning? Eh, it’s there, if you squint hard enough, like a half-remembered dream.

Middle? Sure, if you want to call a few disconnected ramblings a “middle,” but you’ll be too dizzy to care.

End? Ha. It’s not an end. It’s a drop into nothing, like staring down the throat of a black hole while your mind spins out of control.

You don’t get resolution. You don’t get closure. You get nothing but that gnawing feeling in your gut, the one that tells you maybe everything—maybe everything, even your own damn life—is as ridiculous as this chaos on paper.

You’re left hanging, still trying to figure out how you ended up here, knowing full well that you never will.

5. The Joke’s on You (And Everyone Else, Too)

Lem isn’t just mocking bureaucracy—he’s digging the knife into the very idea that we can ever truly understand anything at all.

The real punchline here is the fact that we even try, as if we’re supposed to make sense of a world that’s built on contradictions, half-truths, and dead ends.

The more we strain for clarity, the more we suffocate in confusion. Every department, every memo, every rule is a reminder that knowledge is just a veil, a smokescreen that we chase while it shifts out of reach.

The protagonist is trapped in a labyrinth of offices and endless paperwork, where everyone’s motives are as murky as a flooded basement.

He’s sent on investigations that lead nowhere, chasing leads that evaporate the moment he gets close.

The whole system is one big cruel joke, a mockery of logic itself. At one point, the protagonist is told to “investigate” a room he’s already sitting in, then told to investigate the investigation, until everything blurs into an endless loop of pointlessness.

You can almost hear Lem laughing in the background, daring you to think you’ve figured it out.

In this book, paranoia isn’t just some random condition or plot device—it’s the human condition. It’s baked into every page.

Characters don’t just suspect—they know they’re being watched, misled, betrayed. And yet, they can’t escape it. It’s in the air they breathe, the footsteps behind them, the whispers they hear in the halls.

Lem paints a picture where paranoia isn’t a side effect of the system—it is the system.

Everyone’s caught in the same paranoid dance, constantly trying to figure out what’s real, only to find that reality itself is as slippery as oil on water.

The real madness isn’t the plot—it’s the idea that we can ever make sense of it.

Conclusion: Welcome to the Abyss, Bring Snacks

This book doesn’t care about your need for meaning. It chews up your expectations and spits them out, laughing the whole way.

So if you ever feel lost, stuck in some endless loop of meaningless rules and contradictions—whether it’s at work, in life, or just staring at a government form—you’ll know exactly what Lem was talking about.

And that, my friend, is the scariest part of all.