Sebastian in a Dream

Sebastian in a Dream is the first half of Tarnawsky's final dilogy, published the year before his death in October 2025. The structure is borrowed from Bach's Goldberg Variations: thirty variations bracketed by an aria stated at the opening and restated at the close. The narrator is a semi-comatose man waiting for a son who may or may not arrive, the entire novel taking place inside an internal monologue that keeps revising what it just said.

The title is drawn from Georg Trakl's 1915 poem of the same name. Tarnawsky described his method to The Collidescope in 2022: "Writing for me is akin to proving a theorem; the goal is to do it, and do it as elegantly as possible."

The companion volume is The Burial of the Count of Orgaz, structured on El Greco's painting; together they form the dilogy that closes Tarnawsky's prose career.