POE’S SHORT STORIES “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843)

Summary

An unnamed narrator opens the story by addressing the reader and claiming that he is nervous but not mad.
He says that he is going to tell a story in which he will defend his sanity yet confess to having killed an old man.
His motivation was neither passion nor desire for money, but rather a fear of the man’s pale blue eye. Again,
he insists that he is not crazy because his cool and measured actions, though criminal, are not those of a
madman. Every night, he went to the old man’s apartment and secretly observed the man sleeping. In the
morning, he would behave as if everything were normal. After a week of this activity, the narrator decides,
somewhat randomly, that the time is right actually to kill the old man.

When the narrator arrives late on the eighth night, though, the old man wakes up and cries out. The narrator
remains still, stalking the old man as he sits awake and frightened. The narrator understands how frightened
the old man is, having also experienced the lonely terrors of the night. Soon, the narrator hears a dull
pounding that he interprets as the old man’s terrified heartbeat. Worried that a neighbor might hear the loud
thumping, he attacks and kills the old man. He then dismembers the body and hides the pieces below the
floorboards in the bedroom. He is careful not to leave even a drop of blood on the floor. As he finishes his job,
a clock strikes the hour of four. At the same time, the narrator hears a knock at the street door. The police
have arrived, having been called by a neighbor who heard the old man shriek. The narrator is careful to be
chatty and to appear normal. He leads the officers all over the house without acting suspiciously. At the height
of his bravado, he even brings them into the old man’s bedroom to sit down and talk at the scene of the
crime. The policemen do not suspect a thing. The narrator is comfortable until he starts to hear a low
thumping sound. He recognizes the low sound as the heart of the old man, pounding away beneath the
floorboards. He panics, believing that the policemen must also hear the sound and know his guilt. Driven mad
by the idea that they are mocking his agony with their pleasant chatter, he confesses to the crime and shrieks
at the men to rip up the floorboards.

Analysis

Poe uses his words economically in the “Tell-Tale Heart”—it is one of his shortest stories—to provide a study
of paranoia and mental deterioration. Poe strips the story of excess detail as a way to heighten the murderer’s
obsession with specific and unadorned entities: the old man’s eye, the heartbeat, and his own claim to sanity.
Poe’s economic style and pointed language thus contribute to the narrative content, and perhaps this
association of form and content truly exemplifies paranoia. Even Poe himself, like the beating heart, is
complicit in the plot to catch the narrator in his evil game.

As a study in paranoia, this story illuminates the psychological contradictions that contribute to a murderous
profile. For example, the narrator admits, in the first sentence, to being dreadfully nervous, yet he is unable to
comprehend why he should be thought mad. He articulates his self-defense against madness in terms of
heightened sensory capacity. Unlike the similarly nervous and hypersensitive Roderick Usher in “The Fall of the
House of Usher,” who admits that he feels mentally unwell, the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” views his
hypersensitivity as proof of his sanity, not a symptom of madness. This special knowledge enables the narrator
to tell this tale in a precise and complete manner, and he uses the stylistic tools of narration for the purposes
of his own sanity plea. However, what makes this narrator mad—and most unlike Poe—is that he fails to
comprehend the coupling of narrative form and content. He masters precise form, but he unwittingly lays out
a tale of murder that betrays the madness he wants to deny.
Another contradiction central to the story involves the tension between the narrator’s capacities for love and
hate. Poe explores here a psychological mystery—that people sometimes harm those whom they love or need
in their lives. Poe examines this paradox half a century before Sigmund Freud made it a leading concept in his
theories of the mind. Poe’s narrator loves the old man. He is not greedy for the old man’s wealth, nor vengeful
because of any slight. The narrator thus eliminates motives that might normally inspire such a violent murder.
As he proclaims his own sanity, the narrator fixates on the old man’s vulture-eye. He reduces the old man to
the pale blue of his eye in obsessive fashion. He wants to separate the man from his “Evil Eye” so he can spare
the man the burden of guilt that he attributes to the eye itself. The narrator fails to see that the eye is the “I”
of the old man, an inherent part of his identity that cannot be isolated as the narrator perversely imagines.

The murder of the old man illustrates the extent to which the narrator separates the old man’s identity from
his physical eye. The narrator sees the eye as completely separate from the man, and as a result, he is capable
of murdering him while maintaining that he loves him. The narrator’s desire to eradicate the man’s eye
motivates his murder, but the narrator does not acknowledge that this act will end the man’s life. By
dismembering his victim, the narrator further deprives the old man of his humanity. The narrator confirms his
conception of the old man’s eye as separate from the man by ending the man altogether and turning him into
so many parts. That strategy turns against him when his mind imagines other parts of the old man’s body
working against him.

Themes Love and Hate

Poe explores the similarity of love and hate in many stories, especially “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “William
Wilson.” Poe portrays the psychological complexity of these two supposedly opposite emotions, emphasizing
the ways they enigmatically blend into each other. Poe’s psychological insight anticipates the theories of
Sigmund Freud, the Austrian founder of psychoanalysis and one of the twentieth century’s most influential
thinkers. Poe, like Freud, interpreted love and hate as universal emotions, thereby severed from the specific
conditions of time and space.

The Gothic terror is the result of the narrator’s simultaneous love for himself and hatred of his rival. The
double shows that love and hate are inseparable and suggests that they may simply be two forms of the most
intense form of human emotion. The narrator loves himself, but when feelings of self-hatred arise in him, he
projects that hatred onto an imaginary copy of himself. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator confesses a love
for an old man whom he then violently murders and dismembers. The narrator reveals his madness by
attempting to separate the person of the old man, whom he loves, from the old man’s supposedly evil eye,
which triggers the narrator’s hatred. This delusional separation enables the narrator to remain unaware of the
paradox of claiming to have loved his victim.

Self vs. Alter Ego

In many of Poe’s Gothic tales, characters wage internal conflicts by creating imaginary alter egos or assuming
alternate and opposite personalities. In “William Wilson,” the divided self takes the form of the narrator’s
imagined double, who tracks him throughout Europe. The rival threatens the narrator’s sense of a coherent
identity because he demonstrates that it is impossible for him to escape his unwanted characteristics. The
narrator uses the alter ego to separate himself from his insanity. He projects his inner turmoil onto his alter
ego and is able to forget that the trouble resides within him. The alter ego becomes a rival of the self because
its resemblance to the self is unmistakable. Suicide results from the delusion that the alter ego is something
real that can be eliminated in order to leave the self in peace. In “The Black Cat” the narrator transforms from
a gentle animal lover into an evil cat-killer. The horror of “The Black Cat” derives from this sudden
transformation and the cruel act—the narrator’s killing of his cat Pluto—which accompanies it. Pluto’s
reincarnation as the second cat haunts the narrator’s guilty conscience. Although the narrator wants to forget
his murder of Pluto, gallows appear in the color of his fur. The fur symbolizes the suppressed guilt that drives
him insane and causes him to murder his wife.

The Power of the Dead over the Living

Poe often gives memory the power to keep the dead alive. Poe distorts this otherwise commonplace literary
theme by bringing the dead literally back to life, employing memory as the trigger that reawakens the dead,
who are usually women. In “Ligeia,” the narrator cannot escape memories of his first wife, Ligeia, while his
second wife, the lady Rowena, begins to suffer from a mysterious sickness. While the narrator’s memories
belong only to his own mind, Poe allows these memories to exert force in the physical world. Ligeia dies, but
her husband’s memory makes him see her in the architecture of the bedroom he shares with his new wife. In
this sense, Gothic terror becomes a love story. The loving memory of a grieving husband revives a dead wife.
“Ligeia” breaks down the barrier between life and death, but not just to scare the reader. Instead, the memory
of the dead shows the power of love to resist even the permanence of death.

Motifs The Masquerade

At masquerades Poe’s characters abandon social conventions and leave themselves vulnerable to crime. In
“The Cask of Amontillado,” for -example, Montresor uses the carnival’s masquerade to fool Fortunato into his
own demise. The masquerade carries the traditional meanings of joy and social liberation. Reality is
suspended, and people can temporarily assume another identity. Montresor exploits these sentiments to do
Fortunato real harm. In “William Wilson,” the masquerade is where the narrator receives his double’s final
insult. The masquerade is enchanting because guests wear a variety of exotic and grotesque costumes, but the
narrator and his double don the same Spanish outfit. The double Wilson haunts the narrator by denying him
the thrill of unique transformation. In a crowd full of guests in costumes, the narrator feels comfortably
anonymous enough to attempt to murder his double. Lastly, in “The Masque of the Red Death,” the ultimate
victory of the plague over the selfish retreat of Prince Prospero and his guests occurs during the palace’s lavish
masquerade ball. The mysterious guest’s gruesome costume, which shows the bloody effects of the Red
Death, mocks the larger horror of Prospero’s party in the midst of his suffering peasants. The pretense of
costume allows the guest to enter the ball, and bring the guests their death in person.

Animals

In Poe’s murder stories, homicide requires animalistic element. Animals kill, they die, and animal imagery
provokes and informs crimes committed between men. Animals signal the absence of human reason and
morality, but sometimes humans prove less rational than their beastly counterparts. The joke behind “The
Murders in the Rue Morgue” is that the Ourang-Outang did it. The savage irrationality of the crime baffles the
police, who cannot conceive of a motiveless crime or fathom the brute force involved. Dupin uses his superior
analytical abilities to determine that the crime couldn’t have been committed by a human. In “The Black Cat,”
the murder of Pluto results from the narrator’s loss of reason and plunge into “perverseness,” reason’s
inhuman antithesis. The story’s second cat behaves cunningly, leading the narrator into a more serious crime
in the murder of his wife, and then betraying him to the police. The role reversal—irrational humans vs.
rational animals—indicates that Poe considers murder a fundamentally animalistic, and therefore inhuman,
act. In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the murderer dehumanize his victims by likening him to animal. The narrator of
“The Tell-Tale Heart” claims to hate and murder the old man’s “vulture eye,” which he describes as “pale blue
with a film over it.” He attempts to justify his actions by implicitly comparing himself to a helpless creature
threatened by a hideous scavenger. In the “Cask of Amontillado,” Montresor does the reverse, readying
himself to commit the crime by equating himself with an animal. In killing Fortunato, he cites his family arms, a
serpent with its fangs in the heel of a foot stepping on it, and motto, which is translated “no one harms me
with impunity.” Fortunato, whose insult has spurred Montresor to revenge, becomes the man whose foot
harms the snake Montresor and is punished with a lethal bite.

Symbols

The Whirlpool

In “MS. Found in a Bottle,” the whirlpool symbolizes insanity. When the whirlpool transports the narrator from
the peaceful South Seas to the surreal waters of the South Pole, it also symbolically transports him out of the
space of scientific rationality to that of the imaginative fancy of the German moralists. The whirlpool destroys
the boat and removes the narrator from a realistic realm, the second whirlpool kills him.

Eyes In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator fixates on the idea that an old man is looking at him with the
Evil Eye and transmitting a curse on him. At the same time that the narrator obsesses over the eye, he wants
to separate the old man from the Evil Eye in order to spare the old man from his violent reaction to the eye.
The narrator reveals his inability to recognize that the “eye” is the “I,” or identity, of the old man. The eyes
symbolize the essence of human identity, which cannot be separated from the body. The eye cannot be killed
without causing the man to die. Similarly, in “Ligeia,” the narrator is unable to see behind Ligeia’s dark and
mysterious eyes. Because the eyes symbolize her Gothic identity, they conceal Ligeia’s mysterious knowledge,
a knowledge that both guides and haunts the narrator.

“Fortunato” In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Poe uses Fortunato’s name symbolically, as an ironic device.
Though his name means “the fortunate one” in Italian, Fortunato meets an unfortunate fate as the victim of
Montresor’s revenge. Fortunato adds to the irony of his name by wearing the costume of a court jester. While
Fortunato plays in jest, Montresor sets out to fool him, with murderous results.
Analysis of Major Characters
Roderick Usher As one of the two surviving members of the Usher family in “The Fall of the House of Usher,”
Roderick is one of Poe’s character doubles, or doppelgangers. Roderick is intellectual and bookish, and his twin
sister, Madeline, is ill and bedridden. Roderick’s inability to distinguish fantasy from reality resembles his
sister’s physical weakness. Poe uses these characters to explore the philosophical mystery of the relationship
between mind and body. With these twins, Poe imagines what would happen if the connection between mind
and body were severed and assigned to separate people. The twin imagery and the incestuous history of the
Usher line establish that Roderick is actually inseparable from his sister. Although mind and body are
separated, they remain dependent on each other for survival. This interdependence causes a chain reaction
when one of the elements suffers a breakdown. Madeline’s physical death coincides with the collapse of both
Roderick’s sanity and the Ushers’ mansion.

C. Auguste Dupin In the stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” Poe creates the
genre of detective fiction and the original expert sleuth, C. Auguste Dupin. In both “The Murders in the Rue
Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin works outside conventional police methods, and he uses his
distance from traditional law enforcement to explore new ways of solving crimes. He continually argues that
the Paris police exhibit stale and unoriginal methods of analysis. He says that the police are easily distracted by
the specific facts of the crime and are unable to provide an objective standpoint from which to investigate. In
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the police cannot move beyond the gruesome nature of the double
homicide. Because they are so distracted by the mutilated and choked victims, they do not closely inspect the
windows of the apartment, which reveal a point of entry and escape. Dupin distances himself from the
emotional aspect of the scene’s violence. Like a mathematician, he views the crime scene as a site of
calculation, and he considers the moves of the murderer as though pitted against him in a chess game.

In “The Purloined Letter,” Dupin solves the theft of the letter by putting himself at risk politically. Whereas the
Paris police tread lightly around the actions of Minister D——, an important government official, Dupin ignores
politics just as he ignores emotion in the gruesome murders of the Rue Morgue. In this story, Dupin reveals his
capacity for revenge. When the Minister insulted him in Vienna years before the crime presently in question,
Dupin promised to repay the slight. This story demonstrates that Dupin’s brilliance is not always
dispassionately mathematical. He cunningly analyzes the external facts of the crime, but he is also motivated
by his hunger for revenge. Dupin must function as an independent detective because his mode of investigation
thrives on intuition and personal cunning, which cannot be institutionalized in a traditional police force.

William Wilson Poe explores the imagery of doubles in “William Wilson.” William Wilson loses his personal
identity when he discovers a classmate who shares not only his full name but also his physical appearance and
manner of speaking. Poe stresses the external aspects of their similarity less than the narrator’s mental
turmoil, which is triggered by his encounter with his rivalrous double. When the narrator attempts to murder
his double in the story’s final moments, he ironically causes his own death. This action demonstrates the bond
of dependence between the hated double and the loved self. The -murder-suicide confirms the double as the
narrator’s alter ego. In other words, the narrator’s double exists not as an external character but rather as part
of the narrator’s imagination. Poe uses the idea of the double to question the narrator’s grasp on reality. The
-murder-suicide implies that the narrator has imagined the existence of his rival because he suffers from
paranoia, a mental state in which the human mind suspects itself to be threatened by external forces that are
just imaginary figments of irs own creation.

Lady Ligeia Many women return from the dead in Poe’s stories, and Lady Ligeia is the most alluring of them
all. Ligeia’s sudden reappearance casts doubt on the mental stability of her husband, the tale’s narrator. Poe
does not focus on the narrator’s unreliability but instead develops the character of the dark and brilliant
Ligeia. Ligeia’s dark features contrast with those of the narrator’s second wife, the fair-skinned and blonde
Lady Rowena. Ligeia does not disappear from the story after her apparent death. In order to watch over her
husband and his cold new bride, Ligeia becomes part of the Gothic architecture of the bridal chamber. Poe
symbolically translates Ligeia’s dark, haunting physical qualities into the Gothic and grotesque elements of the
bedroom, including the eerie gold tapestries that Rowena believes comes alive. Ligeia is not only one of the
dead who come alive but also a force that makes physical objects come alive. She uses these forces to doom
the narrator’s second marriage, and her manifestations in the architecture of the bedroom, whether real or
the product of the narrator and his wife’s imaginations, testify to the power of past emotions to influence the
present and the future.
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE Kurt Vonnegut

Context
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was born in Indianapolis in 1922, a descendant of prominent German-American families. His
father was an architect and his mother was a noted beauty. Both spoke German fluently but declined to teach
Kurt the language in light of widespread anti-German sentiment following World War I. Family money helped
send Vonnegut’s two siblings to private schools. The Great Depression hit hard in the 1930s, though, and the
family placed Kurt in public school while it moved to more modest accommodations. While in high school,
Vonnegut edited the school’s daily newspaper. He attended college at Cornell for a little over two years, with
instructions from his father and brother to study chemistry, a  subject at which he did not excel. He also wrote
for the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S.  Army. In 1944 his mother committed suicide, and
Vonnegut was taken prisoner following the Battle of the Bulge, in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium.

After the war, Vonnegut married and entered a master’s degree program in anthropology at the University of
Chicago. He also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. His master’s thesis,
titled Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, was rejected. He departed for Schenectady, New
York, to take a job in public relations at a General Electric research laboratory.

Vonnegut left GE in 1951 to devote himself full-time to writing. During the 1950s, Vonnegut published short
stories in national magazines.Player Piano, his first novel, appeared in 1952. Sirens of Titan was published in
1959, followed by Mother Night (1962), Cat’s Cradle(1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rose-water (1965), and his
most highly praised work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut wrote prolifically until his death in 2007.

Slaughterhouse-Five treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history—the World War II
firebombing of Dresden, a city in eastern Germany, on February 13, 1945—with mock-serious humor and clear
antiwar sentiment. More than 130,000 civilians died in Dresden, roughly the same number of deaths that
resulted from the Allied bombing raids on Tokyo and from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, both of
which also occurred in 1945. Inhabitants of Dresden were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a
firestorm sucked up and consumed available oxygen. The scene on the ground was one of unimaginable
destruction.

The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s own experience in World War II. In the novel, a prisoner of war
witnesses and survives the Allied forces’ firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut, like his pro-tagonist Billy Pilgrim,
emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His
surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians
came and the war ended. Vonnegut survived by chance, confined as a prisoner of war (POW ) in a well-
insulated meat locker, and so missed the cataclysmic moment of attack, emerging the day after into the
charred ruins of a once-beautiful cityscape. Vonnegut has said that he always intended to write about the
experience but found himself incapable of doing so for more than twenty years. Although he attempted to
describe in simple terms what happened and to create a linear narrative, this strategy never worked for him.
Billy Pilgrim’s unhinged time—shifting, a mechanism for dealing with the unfathomable aggression and mass
destruction he witnesses, is Vonnegut’s solution to the problem of telling an untellable tale.

Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a response to war. “It is so short and jumbled and jangled,” he
explains in Chapter 1, “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.” The jumbled structure of
the novel and the long delay between its conception and completion serve as testaments to a very personal
struggle with heart-wrenching material. But the timing of the novel’s publication also deserves notice: in 1969,
the United States was in the midst of the dismal Vietnam War. Vonnegut was an outspoken pacifist and critic
of the conflict. Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around the willful incineration of 100,000 civilians, in a city of
extremely dubious military significance, during an arguably just war. Appearing when it did,
then, Slaughterhouse-Five made a forceful statement about the campaign in Vietnam, a war in which
incendiary technology was once more being employed against nonmilitary targets in the name of a dubious
cause.

Billy Pilgrim is born in 1922 and grows up in Ilium, New York. A funny-looking, weak youth, he does reasonably
well in high school, enrolls in night classes at the Ilium School of Optometry, and is drafted into the army
during World War II. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant in South Carolina, where an umpire officiates during
practice battles and announces who survives and who dies before they all sit down to lunch together. Billy’s
father dies in a hunting accident shortly before Billy ships overseas to join an infantry regiment in Luxembourg.
Billy is thrown into the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium and is immediately taken prisoner behind German lines.
Just before his capture, he experiences his first incident of time—shifting: he sees the entirety of his life, from
beginning to end, in one sweep.

Billy is transported in a crowded railway boxcar to a POW  camp in Germany. Upon his arrival, he and the
other privates are treated to a feast by a group of fellow prisoners, who are English officers who were
captured earlier in the war. Billy suffers a breakdown and gets a shot of morphine that sends him time-tripping
again. Soon he and the other Americans travel onward to the beautiful city of Dresden, still relatively
untouched by wartime privation. Here the prisoners must work for their keep at various labors, including the
manufacture of a nutritional malt syrup. Their camp occupies a former slaughterhouse. One night, Allied
forces carpet bomb the city, then drop incendiary bombs to create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen
into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating roughly 130,000 people. Billy and his fellow POW s survive in an
airtight meat locker. They emerge to find a moonscape of destruction, where they are forced to excavate
corpses from the rubble. Several days later, Russian forces capture the city, and Billy’s involvement in the war
ends.

Billy returns to Ilium and finishes optometry school. He gets engaged to Valencia Merble, the obese daughter
of the school’s founder. After a nervous breakdown, Billy commits himself to a veterans’ hospital and receives
shock treatments. During his stay in the mental ward, a fellow patient introduces Billy to the science fiction
novels of a writer named Kilgore Trout. After his recuperation, Billy gets married. His wealthy father-in-law
sets him up in the optometry business, and Billy and Valencia raise two children and grow rich. Billy acquires
the trappings of the suburban American dream: a Cadillac, a stately home with modern appliances, a
bejeweled wife, and the presidency of the Lions Club. He is not aware of keeping any secrets from himself, but
at his eighteenth wedding anniversary party the sight of a barbershop quartet makes him break down
because, he realizes, it triggers a memory of Dresden.

The night after his daughter’s wedding in 1967, as he later reveals on a radio talk show, Billy is kidnapped by
two-foot-high aliens who resemble upside-down toilet plungers, who he says are called Tralfamadorians. They
take him in their flying saucer to the planet Tralfamadore, where they mate him with a movie actress named
Montana Wildhack. She, like Billy, has been brought from Earth to live under a transparent geodesic dome in a
zoo where Tralfamadorians can observe extraterrestrial curiosities. The Tralfamadorians explain to Billy their
perception of time, how its entire sweep exists for them simultaneously in the fourth dimension. When
someone dies, that person is simply dead at a particular time. Somewhere else and at a different time he or
she is alive and well. Tralfamadorians prefer to look at life’s nicer moments.

When he returns to Earth, Billy initially says nothing of his experiences. In 1968, he gets on a chartered plane
to go to an optometry conference in Montreal. The plane crashes into a mountain, and, among the
optometrists, only Billy survives. A brain surgeon operates on him in a Vermont hospital. On her way to visit
him there, Valencia dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning after crashing her car. Billy’s daughter
places him under the care of a nurse back home in Ilium. But he feels that the time is ripe to tell the world
what he has learned. Billy has foreseen this moment while time-tripping, and he knows that his message will
eventually be accepted. He sneaks off to New York City, where he goes on a radio talk show. Shortly
thereafter, he writes a letter to the local paper. His daughter is at her wit’s end and does not know what to do
with him. Billy makes a tape recording of his account of his death, which he predicts will occur in 1976 after
Chicago has been hydrogen-bombed by the Chinese. He knows exactly how it will happen: a vengeful man he
knew in the war will hire someone to shoot him. Billy adds that he will experience the violet hum of death and
then will skip back to some other point in his life. He has seen it all many times.

Billy Pilgrim

Billy Pilgrim is the unlikeliest of antiwar heroes. An unpopular and complacent weakling even before the war
(he prefers sinking to swimming), he becomes a joke as a soldier. He trains as a chaplain’s assistant, a duty
that earns him disgust from his peers. With scant preparation for armed conflict, no weapons, and even an
improper uniform, he is thrust abruptly into duty at the Battle of the Bulge. The farcical spectacle created by
Billy’s inappropriate clothing accentuates the absurdity of such a scrawny, mild-mannered soldier. His azure
toga, a leftover scrap of stage curtain, and his fur-lined overcoat, several sizes too small, throw his incongruity
into relief. They underscore a central irony: such a creature could walk through war, oblivious yet unscathed,
while so many others with more appropriate attire and provisions perish. It is in this shocked and physically
exhausted state that Billy first comes “unstuck in time” and begins swinging to and fro through the events of
his life, past and future.

Billy lives a life full of indignity and so, perhaps, has no great fear of death. He is oddly suited, therefore, to the
Tralfamadorian philosophy of accepting death. This fact may point to an interpretation of the Tralfamadorians
as a figment of Billy’s disturbed mind, an elaborate coping mechanism to explain the meaningless slaughter
Billy has witnessed. By uttering “So it goes” after each death, the narrator, like Billy, does not diminish the
gravity of death but rather lends an equalizing dignity to all death, no matter how random or ironic, how
immediate or removed. Billy’s father dies in a hunting accident just as Billy is about to go off to war. So it goes.
A former hobo dies in Billy’s railway car while declaring the conditions not bad at all. So it goes. One hundred
thirty thousand innocent people die in Dresden. So it goes. Valencia Pilgrim accidentally kills herself with
carbon monoxide after turning bright blue. So it goes. Billy Pilgrim is killed by an assassin’s bullet at exactly the
time he has predicted, in the realization of a thirty-some-year-old death threat. So it goes. Billy awaits death
calmly, without fear, knowing the exact hour at which it will come. In so doing, he gains a degree of control
over his own dignity that he has lacked throughout most of his life.

The novel centers on Billy Pilgrim to a degree that excludes the development of the supporting characters,
who exist in the text only as they relate to Billy’s experience of events.
Themes The Destructiveness of War

Whether we read Slaughterhouse-Five as a science-fiction novel or a quasi-autobiographical moral statement,

we cannot ignore the destructive properties of war, since the catastrophic firebombing of the German town of
Dresden during World War II situates all of the other seemingly random events. From his swimming lessons at
the YM CA  to his speeches at the Lions Club to his captivity in Tralfamadore, Billy Pilgrim shifts in and out of
the meat locker in Dresden, where he very narrowly survives asphyxiation and incineration in a city where fire
is raining from the sky.

However, the not-so-subtle destructiveness of the war is evoked in subtle ways. For instance, Billy is quite
successful in his postwar exploits from a materialistic point of view: he is president of the Lions Club, works as
a prosperous optometrist, lives in a thoroughly comfortable modern home, and has fathered two children.
While Billy seems to have led a productive postwar life, these seeming markers of success speak only to its
surface. He gets his job not because of any particular prowess but as a result of his father-in-law’s efforts.
More important, at one point in the novel, Billy walks in on his son and realizes that they are unfamiliar with
each other. Beneath the splendor of his success lies a man too war-torn to understand it. In fact, Billy’s name,
a diminutive form of William, indicates that he is more an immature boy than a man.

Vonnegut, then, injects the science-fiction thread, including the Tralfamadorians, to indicate how greatly the
war has disrupted Billy’s existence. It seems that Billy may be hallucinating about his experiences with the
Tralfamadorians as a way to escape a world destroyed by war—a world that he cannot understand.
Furthermore, the Tralfamadorian theory of the fourth dimension seems too convenient a device to be more
than just a way for Billy to rationalize all the death with he has seen face-to-face. Billy, then, is a traumatized
man who cannot come to terms with the destructiveness of war without invoking a far-fetched and impossible
theory to which he can shape the world.

The Illusion of Free Will

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut utilizes the Tralfamadorians, with their absurdly humorous toilet-plunger

shape, to discuss the philosophical question of whether free will exists. These aliens live with the knowledge of
the fourth dimension, which, they say, contains all moments of time occurring and reoccurring endlessly and
simultaneously. Because they believe that all moments of time have already happened (since all moments
repeat themselves endlessly), they possess an attitude of acceptance about their fates, figuring that they are
powerless to change them. Only on Earth, according to the Tralfamadorians, is there talk of free will, since
humans, they claim, mistakenly think of time as a linear progression.

Throughout his life, Billy runs up against forces that counter his free will. When Billy is a child, his father lets
him sink into the deep end of a pool in order to teach him how to swim. Much to his father’s dismay, however,
Billy prefers the bottom of the pool, but, against his free will to stay there, he is rescued. Later, Billy is drafted
into the war against his will. Even as a soldier, Billy is a joke, lacking training, supplies, and proper clothing. He
bobs along like a puppet in Luxembourg, his civilian shoes flapping on his feet, and marches through the
streets of Dresden draped in the remains of the scenery from a production of Cinderella.

Even while Vonnegut admits the inevitability of death, with or without war, he also tells us that he has
instructed his sons not to participate in massacres or in the manufacture of machinery used to carry them out.
But acting as if free will exists does not mean that it actually does. As Billy learns to accept the Tralfamadorian
teachings, we see how his actions indicate the futility of free will. Even if Billy were to train hard, wear the
proper uniform, and be a good soldier, he might still die like the others in Dresden who are much better
soldiers than he. That he survives the incident as an improperly trained joke of a soldier is a testament to the
deterministic forces that render free will and human effort an illusion.

The Importance of Sight

True sight is an important concept that is difficult to define forSlaughterhouse-Five. As an optometrist in Ilium,
Billy has the professional duty of correcting the vision of his patients. If we extend the idea of seeing beyond
the literal scope of Billy’s profession, we can see that Vonnegut sets Billy up with several different lenses with
which to correct the world’s nearsightedness. One of the ways Billy can contribute to this true sight is through
his knowledge of the fourth dimension, which he gains from the aliens at Tralfamadore. He believes in the
Tralfamadorians’ view of time—that all moments of time exist simultaneously and repeat themselves
endlessly. He thus believes that he knows what will happen in the future (because everything has already
happened and will continue to happen in the same way).

One can also argue, however, that Billy lacks sight completely. He goes to war, witnesses horrific events, and
becomes mentally unstable as a result. He has a shaky grip on reality and at random moments experiences
overpowering flashbacks to other parts of his life. His sense that aliens have captured him and kept him in a
zoo before sending him back to Earth may be the product of an overactive imagination. Given all that Billy has
been through, it is logical to believe that he has gone insane, and it makes sense to interpret these bizarre
alien encounters as hallucinatory incidents triggered by mundane events that somehow create an association
with past traumas. Looking at Billy this way, we can see him as someone who has lost true sight and lives in a
cloud of hallucinations and self-doubt. Such a view creates the irony that one employed to correct the myopic
view of others is actually himself quite blind.

Motifs “So It Goes”

The phrase “So it goes” follows every mention of death in the novel, equalizing all of them, whether they are
natural, accidental, or intentional, and whether they occur on a massive scale or on a very personal one. The
phrase reflects a kind of comfort in the Tralfamadorian idea that although a person may be dead in a
particular moment, he or she is alive in all the other moments of his or her life, which coexist and can be
visited over and over through time travel. At the same time, though, the repetition of the phrase keeps a tally
of the cumulative force of death throughout the novel, thus pointing out the tragic inevitability of death.

The Presence of the Narrator as a Character

Vonnegut frames his novel with chapters in which he speaks in his own voice about his experience of war. This
decision indicates that the fiction has an intimate connection with Vonnegut’s life and convictions. Once that
connection is established, however, Vonnegut backs off and lets the story of Billy Pilgrim take over.
Throughout the book, Vonnegut briefly inserts himself as a character in the action: in the latrine at
the P OW  camp, in the corpse mines of Dresden, on the phone when he mistakenly dials Billy’s number. These
appearances anchor Billy’s life to a larger reality and highlight his struggle to fit into the human world.
Symbols The Bird Who Says “Poo-tee-weet?”

The jabbering bird symbolizes the lack of anything intelligent to say about war. Birdsong rings out alone in the
silence after a massacre, and “Poo-tee-weet?” seems about as appropriate a thing to say as any, since no
words can really describe the horror of the Dresden firebombing. The bird sings outside of Billy’s hospital
window and again in the last line of the book, asking a question for which we have no answer, just as we have
no answer for how such an atrocity as the firebombing could happen.

The Colors Blue and Ivory

On various occasions in Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy’s bare feet are described as being blue and ivory, as when
Billy writes a letter in his basement in the cold and when he waits for the flying saucer to kidnap him. These
cold, corpselike hues suggest the fragility of the thin membrane between life and death, between worldly and
otherworldly experience.

THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner

Plot Overview
Attempting to apply traditional plot summary to The Sound and the Fury is difficult. At a basic level, the novel
is about the three Compson brothers’ obsessions with the their sister Caddy, but this brief synopsis represents
merely the surface of what the novel contains. A story told in four chapters, by four different voices, and out
of chronological order, The Sound and the Fury requires intense concentration and patience to interpret and
understand.

The first three chapters of the novel consist of the convoluted thoughts, voices, and memories of the three
Compson brothers, captured on three different days. The brothers are Benjy, a severely retarded thirty-three-
year-old man, speaking in April, 1928; Quentin, a young Harvard student, speaking in June, 1910; and Jason, a
bitter farm-supply store worker, speaking again in April, 1928. Faulkner tells the fourth chapter in his own
narrative voice, but focuses on Dilsey, the Compson family’s devoted “Negro” cook who has played a great
part in raising the children. Faulkner harnesses the brothers’ memories of their sister Caddy, using a single
symbolic moment to forecast the decline of the once prominent Compson family and to examine the
deterioration of the Southern aristocratic class since the Civil War.

The Compsons are one of several prominent names in the town of Jefferson, Mississippi. Their ancestors
helped settle the area and subsequently defended it during the Civil War. Since the war, the Compsons have
gradually seen their wealth, land, and status crumble away. Mr. Compson is an alcoholic. Mrs. Compson is a
self-absorbed hypochondriac who depends almost entirely upon Dilsey to raise her four children. Quentin, the
oldest child, is a sensitive bundle of neuroses. Caddy is stubborn, but loving and compassionate. Jason has
been difficult and mean-spirited since birth and is largely spurned by the other children. Benjy is severely
mentally disabled, an “idiot” with no understanding of the concepts of time or morality. In the absence of the
self-absorbed Mrs. Compson, Caddy serves as a mother figure and symbol of affection for Benjy and Quentin.

As the children grow older, however, Caddy begins to behave promiscuously, which torments Quentin and
sends Benjy into fits of moaning and crying. Quentin is preparing to go to Harvard, and Mr. Compson sells a
large portion of the family land to provide funds for the tuition. Caddy loses her virginity and becomes
pregnant. She is unable or unwilling to name the father of the child, though it is likely Dalton Ames, a boy from
town.

Caddy’s pregnancy leaves Quentin emotionally shattered. He attempts to claim false responsibility for the
pregnancy, lying to his father that he and Caddy have committed incest. Mr. Compson is indifferent to Caddy’s
promiscuity, dismissing Quentin’s story and telling his son to leave early for the Northeast.

Attempting to cover up her indiscretions, Caddy quickly marries Herbert Head, a banker she met in Indiana.
Herbert promises Jason Compson a job in his bank. Herbert immediately divorces Caddy and rescinds Jason’s
job offer when he realizes his wife is pregnant with another man’s child. Meanwhile, Quentin, still mired in
despair over Caddy’s sin, commits suicide by drowning himself in the Charles River just before the end of his
first year at Harvard.

The Compsons disown Caddy from the family, but take in her newborn daughter, Miss Quentin. The task of
raising Miss Quentin falls squarely on Dilsey’s shoulders. Mr. Compson dies of alcoholism roughly a year after
Quentin’s suicide. As the oldest surviving son, Jason becomes the head of the Compson household. Bitterly
employed at a menial job in the local farm-supply store, Jason devises an ingenious scheme to steal the money
Caddy sends to support Miss Quentin’s upbringing.

Miss Quentin grows up to be an unhappy, rebellious, and promiscuous girl, constantly in conflict with her
overbearing and vicious uncle Jason. On Easter Sunday, 1 9 2 8 , Miss Quentin steals several thousand dollars
from Jason and runs away with a man from a traveling show. While Jason chases after Miss Quentin to no
avail, Dilsey takes Benjy and the rest of her family to Easter services at the local church.

A Note on the Title The title of The Sound and the Fury refers to a line from William
Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Macbeth, a Scottish general and nobleman, learns of his wife’s suicide and feels that
his life is crumbling into chaos. In addition to Faulkner’s title, we can find several of the novel’s important
motifs in Macbeth’s short soliloquy in Act V, scene v:
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day 
To the last syllable of recorded time, 
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools 
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle. 
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player 
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.  (V.v.18–27)

The Sound and the Fury literally begins as a “tale / Told by an idiot,” as the first chapter is narrated by the
mentally disabled Benjy. The novel’s central concerns include time, much like Macbeth’s “[t]omorrow, and
tomorrow”; death, recalling Macbeth’s “dusty death”; and nothingness and disintegration, a clear reference to
Macbeth’s lament that life “[s]ignif[ies] nothing.” Additionally, Quentin is haunted by the sense that the
Compson family has disintegrated to a mere shadow of its former greatness.

In his soliloquy, Macbeth implies that life is but a shadow of the past and that a modern man, like himself, is
inadequately equipped and unable to achieve anything near the greatness of the past. Faulkner reinterprets
this idea, implying that if man does not choose to take his own life, as Quentin does, the only alternatives are
to become either a cynic and materialist like Jason, or an idiot like Benjy, unable to see life as anything more
than a meaningless series of images, sounds, and memories.

Analysis of Major Characters

Mr. Jason Compson III Mr. Compson is a well-spoken but very cynical and detached man. He subscribes to a
philosophy of determinism and fatalism—he believes life is essentially meaningless and that he can do little to
change the events that befall his family. Despite his cynicism, however, Mr. Compson maintains notions of
gentlemanliness and family honor, which Quentin inherits. Mr. Compson risks the family’s financial well-being
in exchange for the potential prestige of Quentin’s Harvard education, and he tells stories that foster
Quentin’s nearly fanatical obsession with the family name.

Though he inculcates his son with the concept of family honor, Mr. Compson is unconcerned with it in
practice. He acts indifferent to Quentin about Caddy’s pregnancy, telling him to accept it as a natural womanly
shortcoming. Mr. Compson’s indifference greatly upsets Quentin, who is ashamed by his father’s disregard for
traditional Southern ideals of honor and virtue. Mr. Compson dismisses Quentin’s concerns about Caddy and
tells his son not to take himself so seriously, which initiates Quentin’s rapid fall toward depression and suicide.
Mr. Compson dies of alcoholism shortly thereafter.

Mrs. Caroline Compson Mrs. Compson’s negligence and disregard contribute directly to the family’s
downfall. Constantly lost in a self-absorbed haze of hypochondria and self-pity, Mrs. Compson is absent as a
mother figure to her children and has no sense of her children’s needs. She even treats the mentally disabled
Benjy cruelly and selfishly. Mrs. Compson foolishly lavishes all of her favor and attention upon Jason, the one
child who is incapable of reciprocating her love. Mrs. Compson’s self-absorption includes a neurotic insecurity
over her Bascomb family name, the honor of which is undermined by her brother Maury’s adulterous
behavior. Caroline ultimately makes the decision to change her youngest son’s name from Maury to Benjamin
because of this insecurity about her family’s reputation.

Candace Compson Caddy is perhaps the most important figure in the novel, as she represents the object of
obsession for all three of her brothers. As a child, Caddy is somewhat headstrong, but very loving and
affectionate. She steps in as a mother figure for Quentin and Benjy in place of the self-absorbed Mrs.
Compson. Caddy’s muddying of her underwear in the stream as a young girl foreshadows her later
promiscuity. It also presages and symbolizes the shame that her conduct brings on the Compson family.

Caddy does feel some degree of guilt about her promiscuity because she knows it upsets Benjy so much. On
the other hand, she does not seem to understand Quentin’s despair over her conduct. She rejects the
Southern code that has defined her family’s history and that preoccupies Quentin’s mind. Unlike Quentin, who
is unable to escape the tragic world of the Compson household, Caddy manages to get away. Though Caddy is
disowned, we sense that this rejection enables her to escape an environment in which she does not really
belong.

Benjy Compson A moaning, speechless idiot, Benjy is utterly dependent upon Caddy, his only real source of
affection. Benjy cannot understand any abstract concepts such as time, cause and effect, or right and wrong—
he merely absorbs visual and auditory cues from the world around him. Despite his utter inability to
understand or interpret the world, however, Benjy does have an acute sensitivity to order and chaos, and he
can immediately sense the presence of anything bad, wrong, or out of place. He is able to sense Quentin’s
suicide thousands of miles away at Harvard, and senses Caddy’s promiscuity and loss of virginity. In light of
this ability, Benjy is one of the only characters who truly takes notice of the Compson family’s progressing
decline. However, his disability renders Benjy unable to formulate any response other than moaning and
crying. Benjy’s impotence—and the impotence of all the remaining Compson men—is symbolized and
embodied by his castration during his teenage years.

Themes

The Corruption of Southern Aristocratic Values

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of a number of prominent Southern families such as the
Compsons. These aristocratic families espoused traditional Southern values. Men were expected to act like
gentlemen, displaying courage, moral strength, perseverance, and chivalry in defense of the honor of their
family name. Women were expected to be models of feminine purity, grace, and virginity until it came time
for them to provide children to inherit the family legacy. Faith in God and profound concern for preserving the
family reputation provided the grounding for these beliefs.

The Civil War and Reconstruction devastated many of these once-great Southern families economically,
socially, and psychologically. Faulkner contends that in the process, the Compsons, and other similar Southern
families, lost touch with the reality of the world around them and became lost in a haze of self-absorption.
This self-absorption corrupted the core values these families once held dear and left the newer generations
completely unequipped to deal with the realities of the modern world.

We see this corruption running rampant in the Compson family. Mr. Compson has a vague notion of family
honor—something he passes on to Quentin—but is mired in his alcoholism and maintains a fatalistic belief
that he cannot control the events that befall his family. Mrs. Compson is just as self-absorbed, wallowing in
hypochondria and self-pity and remaining emotionally distant from her children. Quentin’s obsession with old
Southern morality renders him paralyzed and unable to move past his family’s sins. Caddy tramples on the
Southern notion of feminine purity and indulges in promiscuity, as does her daughter. Jason wastes his
cleverness on self-pity and greed, striving constantly for personal gain but with no higher aspirations. Benjy
commits no real sins, but the Compsons’ decline is physically manifested through his retardation and his
inability to differentiate between morality and immorality.

The Compsons’ corruption of Southern values results in a household that is completely devoid of love, the
force that once held the family together. Both parents are distant and ineffective. Caddy, the only child who
shows an ability to love, is eventually disowned. Though Quentin loves Caddy, his love is neurotic, obsessive,
and overprotective. None of the men experience any true romantic love, and are thus unable to marry and
carry on the family name.

At the conclusion of the novel, Dilsey is the only loving member of the household, the only character who
maintains her values without the corrupting influence of self-absorption. She thus comes to represent a hope
for the renewal of traditional Southern values in an uncorrupted and positive form. The novel ends with Dilsey
as the torchbearer for these values, and, as such, the only hope for the preservation of the Compson legacy.
Faulkner implies that the problem is not necessarily the values of the old South, but the fact that these values
were corrupted by families such as the Compsons and must be recaptured for any Southern greatness to
return.
Resurrection and Renewal Three of the novel’s four sections take place on or around Easter,1 9 2 8 .
Faulkner’s placement of the novel’s climax on this weekend is significant, as the weekend is associated with
Christ’s crucifixion on Good Friday and resurrection on Easter Sunday. A number of symbolic events in the
novel could be likened to the death of Christ: Quentin’s death, Mr. Compson’s death, Caddy’s loss of virginity,
or the decline of the Compson family in general.

Some critics have characterized Benjy as a Christ figure, as Benjy was born on Holy Saturday and is currently
thirty-three, the same age as Christ at the crucifixion. Interpreting Benjy as a Christ figure has a variety of
possible implications. Benjy may represent the impotence of Christ in the modern world and the need for a
new Christ figure to emerge. Alternatively, Faulkner may be implying that the modern world has failed to
recognize Christ in its own midst.

Though the Easter weekend is associated with death, it also brings the hope of renewal and resurrection.
Though the Compson family has fallen, Dilsey represents a source of hope. Dilsey is herself somewhat of a
Christ figure. A literal parallel to the suffering servant of the Bible, Dilsey has endured Christlike hardship
throughout her long life of service to the disintegrating Compson family. She has constantly tolerated Mrs.
Compson’s self-pity, Jason’s cruelty, and Benjy’s frustrating incapacity. While the Compsons crumble around
her, Dilsey emerges as the only character who has successfully resurrected the values that the Compsons have
long abandoned—hard work, endurance, love of family, and religious faith.

The Failure of Language and Narrative Faulkner himself admitted that he could never satisfactorily
convey the story of The Sound and the Fury through any single narrative voice. His decision to use four
different narrators highlights the subjectivity of each narrative and casts doubt on the ability of language to
convey truth or meaning absolutely.

Benjy, Quentin, and Jason have vastly different views on the Compson tragedy, but no single perspective
seems more valid than the others. As each new angle emerges, more details and questions arise. Even the
final section, with its omniscient third-person narrator, does not tie up all of the novel’s loose ends. In
interviews, Faulkner lamented the imperfection of the final version of the novel, which he termed his “most
splendid failure.” Even with four narrators providing the depth of four different perspectives, Faulkner
believed that his language and narrative still fell short.

Motifs

Time Faulkner’s treatment and representation of time in this novel was hailed as revolutionary.
Faulkner suggests that time is not a constant or objectively understandable entity, and that humans can
interact with it in a variety of ways. Benjy has no concept of time and cannot distinguish between past and
present. His disability enables him to draw connections between the past and present that others might not
see, and it allows him to escape the other Compsons’ obsessions with the past greatness of their name.
Quentin, in contrast, is trapped by time, unable and unwilling to move beyond his memories of the past. He
attempts to escape time’s grasp by breaking his watch, but its ticking continues to haunt him afterward, and
he sees no solution but suicide. Unlike his brother Quentin, Jason has no use for the past. He focuses
completely on the present and the immediate future. To Jason, time exists only for personal gain and cannot
be wasted. Dilsey is perhaps the only character at peace with time. Unlike the Compsons, who try to escape
time or manipulate it to their advantage, Dilsey understands that her life is a small sliver in the boundless
range of time and history.
Order and Chaos Each of the Compson brothers understands order and chaos in a different way.
Benjy constructs order around the pattern of familiar memories in his mind and becomes upset when he
experiences something that does not fit. Quentin relies on his idealized Southern code to provide order. Jason
orders everything in his world based on potential personal gain, attempting to twist all circumstances to his
own advantage. All three of these systems fail as the Compson family plunges into chaos. Only Dilsey has a
strong sense of order. She maintains her values, endures the Compsons’ tumultuous downfall, and is the only
one left unbroken at the end.

Shadows Seen primarily in Benjy’s and Quentin’s sections, shadows imply that the present
state of the Compson family is merely a shadow of its past greatness. Shadows serve as a subtle reminder of
the passage of time, as they slowly shift with the sun through the course of a day. Quentin is particularly
sensitive to shadows, a suggestion of his acute awareness that the Compson name is merely a shadow of what
it once was.

Symbols

Water Water symbolizes cleansing and purity throughout the novel, especially in relation to Caddy.
Playing in the stream as a child, Caddy seems to epitomize purity and innocence. However, she muddies her
underclothes, which foreshadows Caddy’s later promiscuity. Benjy gets upset when he first smells Caddy
wearing perfume. Still a virgin at this point, Caddy washes the perfume off, symbolically washing away her sin.
Likewise, she washes her mouth out with soap after Benjy catches her on the swing with Charlie. Once Caddy
loses her virginity, she knows that no amount of water or washing can cleanse her.

Quentin’s Watch Quentin’s watch is a gift from his father, who hopes that it will alleviate Quentin’s
feeling that he must devote so much attention to watching time himself. Quentin is unable to escape his
preoccupation with time, with or without the watch. Because the watch once belonged to Mr. Compson, it
constantly reminds Quentin of the glorious heritage his family considers so important. The watch’s incessant
ticking symbolizes the constant inexorable passage of time. Quentin futilely attempts to escape time by
breaking the watch, but it continues to tick even without its hands, haunting him even after he leaves the
watch behind in his room.