How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
I think that maybe in every company today there is always at least one person who is going crazy slowly. (2.21)
Slocum describes how in both of his previous companies, as well as the one in which he currently works, people have killed themselves. That doesn't say anything good about the life of white-collar office workers. What's perhaps even more maddening is that after their deaths, they are filed away and probably forgotten.
Quote #2
People in the company like to live well and are unusually susceptible to nervous breakdowns. (2.24)
Nervous breakdowns are frequent in this novel, but like machines, people can be easily fixed and back working again before others within the department even notice they are gone. But are they really fixed? What's actually going on here? Why do these nervous breakdowns continually happen?
Quote #3
And I'm not so confident anymore that my own recollections of my childhood are as infallible as I have always believed them to be. I also think I may have been more unhappy than my daughter when I was young, and felt even more entrapped than she does in my own sense of pathless isolation. (4.8)
Slocum doesn't think his memories from his own life are entirely credible. Is Slocum a reliable narrator? Why or why not?
Quote #4
I wonder if the time will ever come when I will begin, without recognizing I am doing it and without detecting the change, saying out loud the things I now say privately to myself or verbalize in contemplation and if I will therefore become psychotic or one of those men—more often than not they are women—who talk out loud to themselves on sidewalks and buses. (5.59)
Slocum worries often that he will lose self-control. He's afraid that his inner world and outer world will become one, and he will find himself disoriented in both. He also fears this may already be happening to him; his children tease that he talks to himself when he is actually rehearsing his convention speech that he never gives. Why would they make this assumption if he didn't already seem a little cray?
Quote #5
I am especially good on suicides and breakdowns. I can see them coming years in advance. Kagle is close to his breakdown now; his God won't save him, but maybe his boozing and whores will. (6.62)
Those especially susceptible to madness exhibit particular signs, and Kagle is not exempt from Slocum's categorization of him. Again, what about this lifestyle makes people so prone to nervous breakdowns and madness?
Quote #6
(A man's head is his castle.) I don't hear voices. (I sometimes wish I did.) I'm not crazy. I know people do talk about me behind closed doors but I don't imagine I hear what they are saying. (6.83)
Slocum believes his mind is a fortress built to protect him from the madness of the world surrounding him. He remains adamant that he is not crazy, but closed doors threaten to overturn this, as they are one of his greatest fears.
Quote #7
Two dead dogs on a highway seconds apart lead me to think my sanity is finally going and that it is no longer possible for me to separate what I see from what I remember or what I don't want to see. In flickers of disorientation I often glimpse in silhouette from the rear or side people I did not know well and have not seen or thought about in decades. (6.144)
Real and imagined events run into each other and mix in Slocum's mind, and things become hazy and indistinguishable. Is this perhaps because Slocum's real life is somehow not quite "real"?
Quote #8
There are even mornings now when I catch myself scrutinizing her for stains and blemishes obsessively with the same aggressive and scavenging suspicions, and this, I know, is irrational, for she has spent the night in bed with me. I don't want to go crazy. I like to keep tight rein on my reason, thoughts, and actions, and to know always which is which. I don't want to lose my inhibitions. (6.191)
Though Slocum doesn't think his wife is smart enough to have an affair, he still remains paranoid that she might. Is this something most housewives do? Or is Slocum simply imagining the signs? Why might so many housewives have affairs, anyway? Are they unfulfilled? As unfulfilled as their office-worker husbands?
Quote #9
(And am not positive if I did. I sometimes think of saying something and am not certain afterward if I did. Even in conversations I know are imaginary, I'm not always sure I remember what I've imagined.) (6.265)
Slocum has a difficult time distinguishing his thoughts from reality. This makes sense, because he exists in a world where he cannot say what he thinks. When thoughts become so bottled up inside of him, perhaps he thinks that he has lifted the throttle and blurted it all out.
Quote #10
I walk around with jitters, headaches, and sadness ballooning and squiggling about inside me that seem to belong to somebody else. Is this schizophrenia, or merely a normal, natural, typical, wholesome, logical, universal schizoid formation? (I could plead temporary insanity. They would call it a mercy killing. There would be testimony under oath that it was done to put him out of his misery. He isn't miserable.) (6.8)
Slocum isn't insane, nor is Derek miserable. But ironically, Slocum would have to claim insanity to put Derek out of any misery. Huh? Slocum might be losing it a bit here, or else he's clearly not thinking things through before he says them. Or maybe what Slocum is saying is acknowledging that categories like "insane" make no sense in a world that is insane. There doesn't seem to be anything sane or healthy about the lifestyles of any of these people. Maybe the way we've got reality set up is…actually kind of insane.