How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
When she has gone back across the road, the night will be blacker and longer than ever. I have something to say to her – to her? – but of course it will never be said. I feel that I want to be forgiven, I want her to forgive me. But I do not know how to state my crime. My crime, in some odd way, is in being a man and she knows all about this already. It is terrible how naked she makes me feel, like a half grown boy, naked before his mother. (1.3.188)
Here, David is projecting his guilt onto the caretaker at the house. Who does David actually want to forgive him? Who could actually forgive him? How does the early death of David's mother relate to his feelings of guilt?
Quote #5
She wore the strangest smile I had ever seen. It was pained and vindictive and humiliated but she inexpertly smeared across this grimace a bright, girlish gaiety – as rigid as the skeleton beneath her flabby body. If fate ever allowed Sue to reach me, she would kill me with just that smile. (2.2.94)
Here, Sue is trying to conceal her pain from David by smiling at him. And yet the result is the opposite. Her smile actually makes him feel more guilty; it makes him even more aware of her pain. Why does Sue's effort to conceal her pain elicit this reaction in David? Why would he feel less guilty if she begged and pleaded with him?
Quote #6
And I also felt, standing so close to him, feeling such a passion to keep him from terror, that a decision – once again! – had been taken from my hands. For neither my father, nor Hella, was real at that moment. And yet even this was not as real as my despairing sense that nothing was real for me, nothing would ever be real for me again – unless, indeed, this sensation of falling was reality. (2.3.39)
Is David's "sensation of falling" a part of reality? What does it mean when people say that nothing feels real to them? What does it mean when David says it? What is preventing things from feeling real to him? What would have to change in order for them to feel real again?