Perhaps it was the middle of January in the present that I first looked up and saw the mark on the wall.
The opening line of the story provides the sense of setting necessary to understand the psychological state of the narrator: it is cold, forlorn, and lonely. The fact that the memory is a bit vague—note that she begins stating that “perhaps” it was the middle of January—is also a clue into the mind of the writer. It sets up the ambiguity about when and how many times she saw the mark, and it complicates the resulting stories she tells in her mind—when are those stories happening? Thus, time is rendered subjective, nonlinear, and relative.
If that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature.
The narrator is not ready to get up and see what the mark on the wall is. She is, however, ready to imagine various scenarios for why the mark would be there. This quote indicates that the narrator is more interested in using the mark as a kind of catalyst for intellectual exercise than she is in actually determining the fact-of-the-matter about what the mark is or where it came from.
Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity!
By this point, the reader knows that this story is about far more than a mere mark on the wall. It’s not the mark on the wall that is important. It is not even what the mark is that is important. What's important is the mystery—a mystery that is far better left unsolved for as long as possible. The narrator herself knows this, for she understands that, at any moment, she can stand up, walk over to the mark, inspect it, and thereby know what it is. This, though, is the "masculine view of things": the claim that everything is as Whitaker's Table of Precedency says it is—clear, ordered, and precise. That is not the true nature of things, however, and she ruminates on how the world would be much more pleasant and peaceful if one stepped back from the claim to knowledge.
“All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail on our wall.”
The mystery is not solved by the narrator, after all: instead, the husband casually destroys the wife’s purpose in not getting out of her chair by identifying the mark as a snail, without even realizing there was a purpose in his wife investigating the mark from a distance. At least the reader isn’t left hanging as to the cause of the mark... Or is she? There is still ambiguity in the mark—we don't have much by way of confirmation that it really was a snail. It is unclear exactly when the husband said this. It is also unclear if there was a snail and it was removed, leaving a mark from the snail in its place.
There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots of an indistinct colour—dim pinks and blues—which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become—I don’t know what...
What is important in this particular quote is the use of the ellipses at its end, which happens numerous other places in the text as well. The ellipsis signifies that the thought is not closed: it can continue to go on. As critic Nena Skrbic notes, the ellipses tie together disparate thoughts and thus "provide a tenuous scaffolding for the text's fragile structure—as if the story might fall apart without them—while at the same time these large, white spaces encourage the reader to mull over what it all means." Ellipses help bind author and reader together, which is certainly necessary in fiction that, at times, discomfits and perplexes in its textual instability.
