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Sigh. These stories aren't getting any easier.
The Tunnel at the Frontier
A tunnel from where to where? A frontier? Is the frontier his own mind? Is his mind the tunnel, between the past and the present? Between sanity and . . . what?
One phrase stood out for me: He had to simulate the motions of rage to feel it at the last."
In the dawn flighting, we read "he was a choleric man . . . (who) might carry on and spoil his whole morning with rage, as he had done before."
Might the man in the tunnel be the same man, who had been choleric in the past, but no longer feels emotions?
- Susan
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"Who wishes to be a meagre
sailorman if he can be a learned and enter the government service? Why,
in time you might be an official and never do anything for remainder of
earthly existence. You could grow long fingernails, and become obese and
dignified. " -
Patrick O'Brian
Did someone really die, or was it the book he was reading?
P. Richman asked:
Did someone really die, or was it the book he was reading?
An excellent question! Of course, the whole story is fiction, and it becomes a grand philosophical question of what is true within the larger fiction and what is fictitious, and isn't everything within the story equally false? But of course there's some truth within the fiction (truth in our realm, not just the context of the fictitious story): historical facts about the war years, universal truths about life and death, and perhaps (though this is speculative) actual events or characterizations in the life of the author or people he encountered. So where does the truth stop and the fiction begin, for this story or any work of fiction?
I'm heading out of state for a few days. I hope to post more about this interesting story next week.
John Finneran
"The Tunnel at the Frontier" begins with a man emerging from a tunnel. At the end of the tunnel, he sees the sea and "[o]n the sea, brilliant light, and a boat with a man in it, doing something with a net over the edge." (p.63).
The unnamed man does not know why he is walking through the tunnel. "It was like waking up from a strong dream, one so strong that for minutes you lie on the borders of the dream and reality and wonder which is which." (p.63) He was unhappy because of a book he had been reading, about a man who loved a woman who "had been killed in the war" and the man was filled with "desperate, everlasting sorrow". "[I]n a hateful world, with war and the threat of war every day at every turn, and tyranny, misery and oppression and grinding poverty of the spirit, he had been happy: and he was lost now, alone in it. Job had been blasted, but Job had a God. This man was quite alone." (p.64).
Finally, the man in the tunnel reflects again: "That was the book?
Irresolutely he put his free hand to his eyes, wavered. That was the book?
"He turned his back to the light and hurried back into the gloom,
faster and faster, his feet alone and hurrying, faster until the echoes were
confounded into the one dull noise of his flight." (p.65)
The clear implication is that it wasn't a book at all that the man was thinking about, but his own life, but there are some ambiguities and unresolved questions here. One of the questions that occurs to me is exactly how did his wife die? We're told she was "killed in the war"; not that she died simply, but that she was killed, suggesting a violent, active death, perhaps from an air raid or being shot. Yet later the man thinks of lying with her in bed ("When there is a body in your bed, do you lie with it or stretch out on the floor; when the body is the corpse of your love, I mean?", p.64) suggesting a more peaceful death, from sickness, perhaps. So how did she die? If it was, say, a shell from an air raid, would that not have injured the man lying there next to her or perhaps destroyed the bed? Maybe she wasn't killed at all. Maybe it was all a book after all.
The tunnel is the great metaphor in this story. Inside is darkness, gloom, death. Outside is "brilliant light" and the promise of a religious deliverance from the problems of this world. The imagery is similar to the accounts of near-death experiences where people speak of passing through a tunnel to the promising bright light at the end. In "The Tunnel", the religious implications are made clearer by the image of the fisherman (often used to symbolize Jesus or St. Peter, or the Catholic Church generally) at the end of the tunnel and the man's deliberate reflections inside the tunnel that he did not believe in God or an afterlife.
At the end of the story, the man rejects the light and hurries back into the darkness of the tunnel. This final embrace of darkness is similar to the endings of the previous two stories: in "The Passeur", the man is tempted to "come back at the dark of the moon" (p.62); and in "The Little Death", Grattan "made no reply, but turned in the darkness" (p.56).
John Finneran
I think Patrick O'Brian tends to think about life through writing, clarifying his own thoughts as he writes up situations. His mother died when he was very young, perhaps too young to have been told (or to have understood) all the details. It's certainly something he would have thought about all his life, perhaps trying to reconcile his thoughts about her through his writings. His brother died in World War II, shot down. The family couldn't have known all the details, they'd have been given a sketchy description heavy on the heroics, full of kindnesses and remembrances by crewmates, less accuracy than the hero-worshipping younger brother would have wanted. Do you suppose he's writing about one or both of those deaths? About his own reactions to them?
- Susan
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"Who wishes to be a meagre
sailorman if he can be a learned and enter the government service? Why,
in time you might be an official and never do anything for remainder of
earthly existence. You could grow long fingernails, and become obese and
dignified. " -
Patrick O'Brian
Susan Wenger wrote:
Do you suppose he's writing about one or both of those deaths? About his own reactions to them?
No doubt PO'B draws on his life experiences when he writes, which would be full of death in any case, and even more so during wartime, as well as on his imagination. Writing no doubt helps him clarify his thoughts many times, but this particular story seems to do the opposite: it takes a straight-forward event (a man loses his wife during the war) and introduces doubt on top of doubt until it's unclear exactly what happened; instead of clarification, it produces mythologization, distortion, and obfuscation, which may have been the intent, or it may have just been the way the story turned out after PO'B put it all down on paper.
John
Well, if I may, I'll jump back into the Short Story discussion with some comments about The Tunnel:
For me this story is a long question about faith and belief.
The man has died - any number of scenerios here - on a subway, the train stopped in a panic (bombing raid?), everyone piles off inside the tunnel for shelter, the man dies in the rush, dies from a heart attack, dies from a "broken heart", just gives up? (is such a death a suicide in the eyes of the Church?)
Or was the train 'life' and he "got off", as in suicide? "feet echoing and flapping" - wings? trumpets?
The light and sea - The Fisher of Men: Heaven, redemption or judgement. But for a man without a God, without a belief in a future life, then what is it? This is the crux. (no pun intended by me, but maybe by POB!)
The illusion of long distance - in a real tunnel one would only see the light, not the details from a distance. "...infinitily remote and unreal - not so much distant..."
He's died, his soul now is slowly recalling his life, as if in a book.
His arm is cramped with carrying his book:story:life:his burden.
"Virtue and courage were ebbing away". Is he referring to the courage of living "alone" as an unbeliever? But what is "virtue" doing here? Is this the 'rightness' of a man living as a Man and not as a child of a God?
"had to simulate the emotions of rage to feel it at the last" "The last" - before he died.
"That was the book. It had made him so unhappy." Lots of possibilities here. The book as burden, life. The Book, as Bible, religion. All unhappiness comes from original sin, but only if you are religious?
And at the end he flees from death, from resurection, from _believing_, because of course, if what he sees is true then his disbelief has been a mistake; either he is afraid to die and embrace his judgement, (even though it looks like going to Heaven) or he is unwilling to go to Heaven because it requires him to turn his back on his unbelief, to admit that Christ exists and give up his aloneness. His conviction requires him to deny the proof of his senses - as a mirror of Job he MUST NOT deny disbelief? So is he damned? Or does his disbelief simply leave him in the same situation?
Man can be saved by belief, even in extremis, but man has free will, if he has the strength to use it?
Is the tunnel, and the darkness, the point of transition, or is it all of life in this world? In other words is there an opposite end of the tunnel or is there only one way out (through Christ)? Is darkness a symbol for evil, or only for earthly life and rejection of possibilities?
To me this is one of the most interesting of the short stories so far, and one that seems to throw considerable light (or shadow!) upon the earlier ones. It also seems to be more tightly constructed. Do we have any indication of the dates when each of these stories was written?
The Path seems to be a very similar story, of crossing the frontier of death, with the pack - the burden:sins:life:soul, and the passport, perhaps lacking the seal (faith? baptism?) but here instead of disbelief perhaps ignorance - someone who has never received the word - is being examined; hence he is left in a never ending path of seeking but never finding - is this purgatory or limbo?. "She" doesn't appear to be either his sister (the Sister) or "Mary" (interesting choice of name) as "she started before me"; might it be a mother, a child, a mistress?
Rowen