"I had done a few things and earned a few pence—I had perhaps even had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the patronizing; but when I take the little measure of my course (a fidgety habit, for it’s none of the longest yet) I count my real start from the evening George Corvick, breathless and worried, came in to ask me a service."
The first-person narrator of this tale remains unnamed throughout the narrative. This opening line of the story is typical Jamesian prose in that it is densely packed and elegantly written. What this long and complex opening sentence really says about the narrator is that he is a person who thinks constantly of himself. Note that, though the sentence contains seventy words, the pronoun “I” appears five times. While “I” is naturally a recurring component of any first-person narrative, this opening line foreshadows what is to come. Though the story is ostensibly about a famous author and the attempts by multiple people to figure out the secret to discovering the meaning of his writing, as far as the narrator is concerned it is he himself who is not just the main character, but the most interesting character as well. Do not be lulled into the trap he tries to set with the pageantry of self-deprecation and the deceptive attempt to place credit upon his friend George. This is a narrator abundantly overflowing with interest in himself. And that idiosyncratic attribute will prove to the cause of misery.
"For himself, beyond doubt, the thing we were all so blank about was vividly there. It was something, I guessed, in the primal plan, something like a complex figure in a Persian carpet."
At the center of the narrative is a celebrated author who is every bit as self-interested as the narrator. The difference between them is key, however. While the narrator is all about the robust presence of the “I” pronoun in speech as well as the written word, the author is much more jealousy possessive about using that pronoun. He reveals himself to be far more clever than the author by constructing a mystery about himself for the purpose of making others see him as an enigma. Since the plot of this story revolves around the search for the titular figure in the carpet, which is allusively mentioned here, one might well suspect that it is the author himself who coins the phrase, though that turns out not to be the case. The narrator here is in the midst of a conversation with the celebrated author who has teased out an important bit of information about himself with the suggestion that there is to be found within his writing a key to understanding the meaning of everything he has written. The author’s genius lies in getting the narrator to come up with that cryptic phrase. Upon voicing this phrase to the other man, the author leaps upon the image with great excitement. He even goes so far as to compare it to an equally oblique metaphor he has constructed for his own personal use. As the story plays out, it will become more and more apparent that a game was being played by the author during which a trap was being set which the narrator eagerly rushed directly into.
“Only then, when I’m his wife—not before. It’s tantamount to saying—isn’t it?—that I must marry him straight off!”
There is a subplot to the story in which George Corvick is aggressively pursuing the hand in marriage to a women named Gwendolen. Naturally, the reader learns the details of this romance second-hand from what the narrator has to say about it. He has enlisted the would-be couple to take part in this quest to find the figure in the carpet and discover the key to the meaning of the great author’s books. Unlike the narrator, George and Gwendolyn go straight to the source, looking over every word written by the author until George can no longer stand it. He takes a job in India and after a few months sends a telegram back to Gwendolyn that he has had a eureka moment and figured out the secret. This telegram does not contain the information, however. In fact, the only word she gets from George is his assurance that he has figured out the secret and that he will not share it with her until after they are married. A short while later, he claims to have met with the author and forwarded his theory directly to him. The author excitedly agreed that he had discovered the figure in the carpet. But this is only second-hand information from George. By the time he attempts to confirm the story first-hand with the author, he discovers that the object of his obsession has died, as did George Corvick himself on the night of his and Gwendolen’s honeymoon. Since the bride never tells anyone what secret George promised to tell her, this creates a secondary mystery: did George actually figure out the secret, or was that claim merely a ploy rush Gwendolen to the altar?
