However, a series of (chance?) encounters with Emily leads to friendship and his detachments begin to erode. For the first time (ever?) he begins to find a friendship and companion who he can share his thoughts and emotions with but at the same time feels safe because she's married. As I read this, I thought that he might actually have been using her marriage as an excuse NOT to get too close. Sure, she was married, and their relationship was "improper", but they did have a common bond.
It was when she touched his face to his that it all clicked for me. She got too close and he used his ability to emotional detach (hiding in a big city?) as an excuse to break off the relationship. The books he was reading suggest that he was conflicted about the relationship and was looking for a way to justify it. For example, when he wrote some quotes from Nietzche suggesting that men and women couldn't be friends because there was intercourse involved, he was using that as an excuse to justify his behavior.
Of course, after he found out that she was dead,it finally sank in. He was a cold hearted SOB and the one person whom he had an attachment to was now dead, possibly because of him. At this moment, he realized that he had blown it and that he may never find another. In her death, he was now unable to hide his emotions and detach. She had gotten to him in the same way he had gotten to her. He was heartbroken.
Maurice--
ReplyDeleteYou picked up something I didn't see: that he may have felt "safe" since she was married. I kept expecting them to fall into bed as nearly all current media would have them do, and didn't catch on as well to your insight about his inability to become attached. Wasn't it interesting that he lived overlooking an empty distillery (mentioned twice), and that when their mutual emotional fulfillment was over he returned to his empty life while she turned to emptying bottles?
really good post, especially picking up the role of the city (in a lot of texts, the city is actually held up as a character, one that affects or is affected by other characters).
ReplyDeleteDid you see Mr Duffy as a similar character to Ralph in Mimic Men? I sure did, and I think you picked up on the idea of how the city life can turn someone into a "cold-hearted SOB"
ReplyDelete