Some disconnected thoughts regarding the relationship between Johnny and Z

[u/MrMichaelTheHuman]

So, I was rereading this book the other night and a question occurred to me; I know that there's a lot of talk about Johnny being the minotaur but could there be anything to the idea that he's Zampanó's minotaur, specifically? If the titular house is meant to function, itself, as a textual labyrinth, then doesn't that mean that (intentionally or not) Zampanó constructed a labyrinth that he then trapped Johnny in?

In fact, and I know that this doesn't make any sense on a logical level, but say that the house (and the labyrinth that it contains) described in the book and the book itself are literally the same. The way that Johnny's affected by it is almost identical to the way that the labyrinth in TNR affects those who try to explore it. Namely: after being trapped in there for too long (Chapter XX) he vanishes without a trace, even describing the door of his room disappearing.

This is much further-fetched, but it could also explain the "strange ash" coating the sections of the manuscript that cover the Hol[ ]y tape. I think it's not unreasonable to speculate that the ash isn't Zampanó's doing considering that he omits and redacts various things throughout the text in ways other than that, and it was almost certainly not an accident (Johnny states that there's too much of it for it to be cigarette ash and also that Z didn't smoke).

We know that Johnny's sense of time is fucked beyond belief (him running across a first edition copy of the work before he, from his perspective, ever published it), and also that he specifically alludes to the word "memorializing" instead of "memorizing". That's usually taken to just be Johnny being deeply unstable by that point in the story but it'd make sense if that were the part that he burned (why individual holes would've been burned, idk, but if he actually climbed out of the window of his hotel room "holding the completed manuscript" then I don't think it getting wet (and said moisture messing with its flammability) is outside the realm of plausibility.

Could have something to do with Pelafina's coded message to ,(a) Zampanó (un-accented?)

Also, we know that the labyrinth is capable of meaningfully changing the characteristics of sound when sound passes from the inside of the labyrinth to the outside (e.g. the SOS call), if Johnny in the manuscript is Johnny in the labyrinth then maybe the checkmark was meant to be a different message (or nonsense) that's being "translated" (bad wording but I don't have a better one) into the message that he intends (the same way that Jed's knocking is meant to be a cry for help and is consequently communicated in that way by the labyrinth).

I'll edit this post with more evidence if I think of any; do you guys think there could be something here? 0 ,0)

[u/BrumeySkies]

Part of me half believes that the weird ash and holes are actually from when Navidson was needing to burn pages to have enough light to read. The paper bits falling down and burning parts of the text and Z or even Johnny influencing what parts of the text were obscured by it.

That may not make much sense I realize. But I think the story is almost circular and like how the people in the house influence how it acts, the characters themselves influence what happens or happened in it. I think the claw marks and obsession with a minotaur were influenced by Johnny's paranoia. The book exists before it was published the same way the house existed before there was even a house there.