Remember the Third of November
The ridiculous man remembers the very moment that he discovered “the truth” and it situated within imagery founded upon a charter of gloom. Literally, that third of November was gloomy. The imagery makes this fact perhaps the clearest point in the entire story:
“It was a gloomy evening, one of the gloomiest possible evenings. I was going home at about eleven o'clock, and I remember that I thought that the evening could not be gloomier. Even physically. Rain had been falling all day, and it had been a cold, gloomy, almost menacing rain, with, I remember, an unmistakable spite against mankind.”
Earth II
It is a dream and anything can happen in a dream, but it also metaphor and the narrator needs his readers to know that his flight through the galaxy to another world did not end at some unknown destination. The flight was not just through space or time, but dimensions. He is transported from earth to earth. A planet that had developed just like ours, but that evolved life differently. The imagery here is sparse and to the point, but among the most important in the story:
“But we were rapidly approaching the planet. It was growing before my eyes; I could already distinguish the ocean, the outline of Europe; and suddenly a feeling of a great and holy jealousy glowed in my heart.”
Paradise Not Lost
The topography of Earth II may be the same as our earth, but there was is one hugely metaphysical divergence. The serpent never enticed Eve to tempt Adam to bite from the forbidden fruit. Eden there was never lost and paradise has been maintained for generations:
“Never had I seen on our own earth such beauty in mankind. Only perhaps in our children, in their earliest years, one might find, some remote faint reflection of this beauty. The eyes of these happy people shone with a clear brightness. Their faces were radiant with the light of reason and fullness of a serenity that comes of perfect understanding, but those faces were gay; in their words and voices there was a note of childlike joy. Oh, from the first moment, from the first glance at them, I understood it all! It was the earth untarnished by the Fall.”
The Serpent
A stunning twist then occurs: the ridiculous man himself turns out to be the serpent in Eden that brings about its downfall. He does not compare himself to serpent, however, but rather a plague, isolation himself as a germ. The imagery of the fall of this paradise is perhaps surprising to some, with details that might not immediately spring to mind as representing the loss of perfection:
“The conception of honor sprang up, and every union began waving its flags. They began torturing animals, and the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became hostile to them. They began to struggle for separation, for isolation, for individuality, for mine and thine. They began to talk in different languages. They became acquainted with sorrow and loved sorrow; they thirsted for suffering, and said that truth could only be attained through suffering. Then science appeared.”
