The “Invisibility Cloak” thread must be deemed a failure both theologically and literarily. It does, however, illustrate certain paradoxes and anomalies we have come to associate with what, in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, was termed the postmodern sensibility.

More than most other blogs of its time, OST cultivated the illusion of being a self-contained community. Any registered user could write a post, but neither posts nor comments provided links to the writers’ own blogs. As a result, participants in OST discussions knew very little about one another outside of the way they represented themselves at OST. This self-presentation was quite formal and rational and impersonal, focusing almost exclusively on serious theological discussion and debate. Though the reader might detect clues about the writers’ lives and character traits, consciously self-revelatory remarks were purposely kept to a minimum.

Doyle initially introduced the Sir Toby’s conceit in response to an anomalously personal post by Wilkinson in which he briefly described his recent visit to Prague. Sir Toby’s became an alternate reality embedded within OST, where frequent discussants were assigned fictional monastic alter-egos meeting in the common room of an inn where plenty of food and beer kept the discussion flowing freely. While donning their fictional identities inserted another layer of illusion between writer and reader, the very unreality of Sir Toby’s may have given Doyle and Wilkinson license to relax their characteristic writerly sef-discipline at OST. As a result, the reader catches brief glimpses of the individuals giving voice to their quasi-mythic doppelgangers.

As the ill-fated “Invisibility Cloak” post stumbles toward its inconclusive end, a metafictional layer is superimposed on the fictional world of Sir Toby’s. Doyle and Wilkinson present themselves as historians revisiting the post as if it had been written in the fairly distant past. Under the guise of exploring authorial intent and unconscious motivations of these supposedly long-dead bloggers, Doyle and Wilkinson further expose their own personal motivations to public scrutiny. Doyle in particular seems bent on psychoanalyzing Wilkinson, while in the process revealing more about his own resentments and frustrations. Doyle, who held a doctorate in psychology and who practiced psychotherapy intermittently during his rather unfocused career, infused his commentator persona with a degree of ruthless cruelty that his Old Man persona lacked. Doyle had by this time written three unpublished books, and his personal correspondence shows that he had approached Wilkinson with the possibility of turning the Sir Toby’s premise into a book. Doyle was experiencing a depressing sense of subjective invisibility due to his inability to get his books published, as is evident in many of his blog posts around this time. That the reprise of Sir Toby’s at OST was obviously failing undoubtedly frustrated Doyle and contributed to the rather abrasive tone of his commentary. In hindsight it is perhaps fortunate that the Sir Toby’s project never materialized, inasmuch as it might have distracted Doyle from writing what would prove to be his masterpiece.

We see layer upon layer of self-distancing at work in this otherwise unremarkable bit of theoliterary experimentation: OST the rational-impersonal virtual community, Sir Toby’s the fictional world-within-a-world, the metafictional commentary on the Sir Toby’s personae. And yet as each layer is added we witness a progressive unveiling of the writers’ “real” personalities. Or were these self-revelations too an illusion and an obfuscation? It was a pervasive and well-documented aspect of the postmodern era that the subjective sense of self was being decentered, multiplied and, in extreme cases, dissolved altogether. In a Moebius-like inversion, the Sir Toby’s writers revealed themselves by donning disguises. By objectively distancing themselves from their writing as “commentators" they exposed themselves as subjects presented themselves as subjects. By burying themselves ever deeper in fictional alternate realities they made themselves more real. Or perhaps none of this is true; perhaps behind every disguise was yet another disguise. One is left to wonder whether, by the end of the Invisibility Cloak thread, the writers had become more visible to themselves, or more invisible.