Annemily's Blog

Chapter 22 begins with the narrator returning from Clifton’s funeral to find the committee waiting for him: “When I saw them sitting in their shirtsleeves, leaning forward, gripping their crossed knees with their hands, I wasn’t surprised. I’m glad it’s you, I thought, this will be a business without tears” (462). Then after describing how the committee watches him, the narrator notes: “The smoke rose in spirals from their cigarettes as they sat perfectly contained, waiting. So you came, after all, I thought, going over and dropping into one of the chairs” (463). I was struck by the narrator’s use of the word “you” outside of direct dialogue. I don’t think he’s done this elsewhere in the book (please correct me if I’m wrong) but here he seems to be very deliberately using it twice in a row. I think the first “you” is probably meant to emphasize that the narrator is glad that the committee is in his office instead of anyone else. The “this will be a business without tears...

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 m...