Justifiable Rationalizing
The plot revolves around a man knowing and willingly going into the snake oil business of selling patent medicine. He is neither evil real estate developer looking to branch out his gift for the grift nor a Scooby-Doo villain, but just a regular man. A regular man capable of rising to metaphorical heights when it comes to perpetrating evil villainy:
“I still clung to the idea that the world of men was or should be a sane and just organisation, and the idea that I should set myself gravely, just at the fine springtime of my life, to developing a monstrous bottling and packing warehouse, bottling rubbish for the consumption of foolish, credulous and depressed people, had in it a touch of insanity.”
The Non-Parent
One of the most rhapsodic of all the metaphorical imagery in the book is devoted to what is also one of the strangest purposes. It is nothing more—nor less, but that’s beside the point—than a portrait of an adult who is not a parent:
“I know not what delirium of pinnacles and terraces and arcades and corridors glittered at last upon the uplands of his mind; the place, for all that its expansion was terminated abruptly by our collapse, is wonderful enough as it stands,—that empty instinctive building of a childless man.”
…Must Come Down
Imagery associated with man in flight in the earliest years of aviation permeates the back half of the novel, providing multiple opportunities for metaphor. Nothing quite makes room for metaphor like the latter half of that old proverb about whatever goes up, however:
“The broken end of a branch had driven right through my cheek, damaging my cheek and teeth and gums, and left a splinter of itself stuck, like an explorer’s fartherest-point flag, in the upper maxillary. That and a sprained wrist were all my damage. But I bled as though I had been chopped to pieces”
Sounding the Note
From the opening paragraph, it is immediately clear the first-person narrator wants to do more than tell a story. He wants to forward a philosophical understanding, gained through first-hand experience. At times, as such, the narration is transformed almost entirely into metaphor for entire passages:
“This is the note I have tried to emphasise, the note that sounds clear in my mind when I think of anything beyond the purely personal aspects of my story. It is a note of crumbling and confusion, of change and seemingly aimless swelling, of a bubbling up and medley of futile loves and sorrows. But through the confusion sounds another note. Through the confusion something drives, something that is at once human achievement and the most inhuman of all existing things”
Beatrice
Beatrice comes into the narrator’s life as an eight-year-old beautiful little aristocratic child of privilege. He is instantly smitten, but, of course, as the housekeeper’s daughter, it is a childhood romance doomed to being forever just that. Beatrice ages and changes:
“Beatrice too had changed. The spring had gone out of her movement; it came to me, for the first time, that some day she might grow old. She had become one flesh with the rest of common humanity; the softness had gone from her voice and manner, the dusky magic of her presence had gone.”
