Development

There’s a packed scene on page 259 at the end of chapter 12 that we didn’t get to discuss in class. It mostly is about the reflection the narrator engages in when he goes to live with Mary. I just wanted to consider a few lines from it here.

The narrator seems to be more self-aware than we’ve seen him before. He asks himself “Who was I, how had I come to be?” then analyzes his feelings in a way I don’t think we’ve really seen before: “Certainly I couldn’t help being different from when I left the campus; but now a new, painful, contradictory voice had grown up within me, and between its demands for revengeful action and Mary’s silent pressure I throbbed with guilt and punishment.” While the narrator might not yet know what he wants, his view of his development since leaving campus seems pretty much in line with his later view and he can at least put a finger on why he’s confused.

The narrator also talks about a desire to make speeches: “And the more resentful I became, the more my old urge to make speeches returned.” Since this is before the eviction and before he is hired to make speeches, I think this shows that he’s thinking more about what he wants and while in his new job he seems to be following someone else’s path, he’s also following his own more so than before.

The narrators humor also comes through in this scene in a way that’s really reminiscent of the introduction. He describes his development as ice on his brain being melted by “a hot red light of such intensity that had Lord Kelvin known of its existence, he would have had to revise his measurements.” The aside in a serious moment and the intellectual nature of referring to Lord Kelvin reminds me of the introduction and the fact that this humor is showing through might be a sign that the narrator is approaching his end personality.

The narrator also pretty clearly signals that he still has a way to develop though. Only a few lines later he thinks “If only all the contradictory voices shouting inside my head would calm down and sing a song in unison, whatever it was I wouldn’t care as long as they sang without dissonance; yes, and avoided the uncertain extremes of the scale.” This is really different from the introduction where he was excited about the dissonance of music played on multiple phonographs at the same time.