The Exposure
OK. Your turn.
What was funny?
Any words you had to look up in the dictionary?
What surprised you in this chapter?
My favorite line: "And this high pride in being human had lifted him unaccountably to an infinite height above the monstrous men around him."
Who is exposed?
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
***SPOILERS***
ReplyDeleteA fascinating point about that scene is that Sunday does nothing to restrain a man he knows is armed. Also, those of us who have finished the book may wonder why expose that one and not some other option? Plus, Syme really gives himself away by his inaction.
Here is a hilarious Chestertonian cameo:
ReplyDelete"The old Professor was staring at the ceiling with dull eyes. 'Every man knows in his heart,' he said, 'that nothing is worth doing.'"
[TMWWT]
(Compare with "if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly." in What's Wrong With the World, CW 4:199)
There is another cameo, quite a bit more horrid, suggested by the Secretary's "'My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man's brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe." which recurs in "The Yellow Bird" in The Poet and the Lunatics...
Another point: there is something with the "stink of evil" in the very Tolkienesque line (near the very beginning of the chapter) about going to the furthest east and west and finding something which wasn't quite .... well, rather than scare the readers, let's say that this is a bit to accurate of a nightmare description. It is this wierd error which makes one want to fight the heretics... (er - the only ones who really ought to be punished!)
Fortunately the humour is restored with the (still dreamlike) description of the meals... Sunday is so Nero-Wolfe-like here.
--Dr. T.