The Thing
The whole story proceeds from the moment that the unnamed narrator discovers from a famous novelist that there is an enigmatic secret to be discovered which unlocks the meaning hidden in all his writing. The title of the story is the narrator’s metaphorical inspiration. The author excitedly agrees before disclosing his favorite personal metaphor describing the same thing. “It’s the very string that my pearls are strung on!” The wonderful thing about metaphors is that they can be interpreted in a number of different ways. Of course, this is also the difficult thing about them. The inescapable fact of the matter is that neither the narrator’s carpet nor the author’s string of pearls offers much insight into what this mysterious secret actually is. Which, as it turns out, is the entire point.
George Corvick
George Corvick is a fellow literary critic and friend of the narrator. What’s more, he is the person responsible for the narrator actually getting to meet the famous novelist. There is something in Corvick’s character which seems to demand metaphorical description. Of Corvick, the narrator observes that “He at least was, in Vereker’s words, a little demon of subtlety…He was like nothing, I told him, but the maniacs who embrace some bedlamitical theory of the cryptic character of Shakespeare.” Taken together, the metaphor and the simile paint a portrait of Corvick as just crazily obsessive enough to be the perfect partner in the narrator’s compulsion to get at the secret that is the figure in the carpet. Ultimately, Corvick proves himself to be truly demonic in his handling of his announcement of having discovered the solution to the mystery.
A Theory of Literature
The narrator never identifies himself by name, yet he is notably self-involved. And like many people whose favorite subject is themselves, he is also subject to view his chosen profession in grandiose terms. A passage that starts out informing the reader about the travails of George Corvick suddenly transform into a robustly metaphorical assertion of the narrator's own private theory of literature. Literature is, according to the narrator, “a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life.” Thus, the logical conclusion of this theory is that, not just the act of creative writing itself, but reading and of producing critical analysis of what one has read, is tantamount to the heroic act of taking one's last breath as far into the future as possible. This conclusion is also an effective rationale for justifying the narrator's obsessive quest to get at the mystery of the figure in the carpet.
The Treasure Hunt
George comes to share the narrator’s obsessive quest until it suddenly seems as if he is overcome and can take no more. Without warning, he leaves all the author’s writing behind and sets sail for a job with a newspaper in India. While in India, isolated and allowed to indulge his own thoughts, he declares the answer to the secret came to him. This unexpected turn of events urges the narrator to a moment of contemplation. He recalls how George “had found Mr. Vereker deliriously interesting and his own possession of the secret a real intoxication. The buried treasure was all gold and gems. Now that it was there it seemed to grow and grow before him.” It is this eureka moment for George which fulfills the promise of his earlier metaphorical description when it came to hunting for treasure. This metaphorical description of the author’s secret as “gold and gems” is revealing of the difference between the narrator’s brand of obsession and that of George Corvick.
The Word of God
The story draws to a close on the image of the narrator seated next to the man who marries the woman that George Corvick’s accidental death leaves a widow while still on her honeymoon. The narrator has been stifled at every turn in this attempt to learn what George has identified as the figure in the carpet. His obsessive path leads to the final disappointment of discovering that a George-to-wife-to-wife’s second husband transfer of the secret did not take place as he had so fervently hoped. In fact, the second husband is completely ignorant of all aspects of the quest. But not for long, as the ever-compulsive narrator proceeds to relate the entire story to him: “beginning with the anecdote of Vereker’s one descent from the clouds.” Such is the state of the monomania of the narrator that, by this point in the tale, his recollection of its origins requires descriptive imagery which metaphorically compares the author to God delivering the word to his worshipful disciples. .
