The Secret Agent Pride Quotes

The Professor fancies himself as a superior kind of human being, but this self-image is totally contrasted with how much of a little pipsqueak he is. The Professor also loves to stay silent, which is a tactic of mental intimidation that he practices on Ossipon at several points in the book. By having the Professor's body be so scrawny, Conrad highlights the fact that anyone with enough gumption can strap a bomb to himself and feel like a king. But it also shows that the Professor's belief in his own greatness doesn't have any connection to the real world.

Ossipon sort of confirms the Professors sense of self-importance. He uses the metonymy of the Professor's glasses to stand for the Professor himself, and imagines these glasses walking around London like a great king. The irony, though, is that it's these types of moments on the London streets that make the Professor super insecure.

The professor claims that the reason he's so confident and proud is because he knows there's no policeman willing to die just to get rid of him. This would require a level of sacrifice that doesn't exist in the London police force. Like Chief Inspector Heat, the Professor knows that the relationship between criminals and the police is just a game. But he thinks this is a game he'll always win, since he's willing to die and others aren't.

The Professor sums up the reason for his confidence when he claims to have more "character" than the people around him. He refers to his character as well-established because he thinks of himself as a very solid person. But he also says well-established because he can only show his power by having people know that he's carrying a bomb and willing to use it. Again, we find here more evidence of the Professor's overwhelming pride. The logic of his position, though, is almost airtight, and this often frustrates Ossipon, who constantly looks for cracks in the Professor's confidence and comes up empty.

At the beginning of this quote, The Professor seems to suggest that just by thinking something is true, he makes it true. But he goes on to explain his position further, basically saying that everyone around him works with the assumption that they'll continue to go on living. The Professor, though, lives with the assumption that he will die, and this puts him in a position of total advantage over them. For him, it's just a matter of mental arithmetic: (Professor + Death) > (Everyone Else + Life). Conrad is definitely critical of the Professor's pride and individualism. But here, he kind of admits that there's a solid logic to what the Professors saying.

This passage gives you a really good sense of how totally antisocial the Professor is. Not only does he think that he's greater than everyone else; he thinks that the world is to blame for him not being totally famous and respected. This helps show that the Professor's pride is actually kind of childish in its self-centeredness. He thinks that his struggles to prove his greatness have made him different than everyone else, even though it's clear that everyone in this book has struggles of their own. There's almost nothing the world can do to treat him with justice because he insists on having everything his way all the time.

This comment comes right on the heels of the Professor saying that he'd like to see social codes done away with. He wants there to be a social cleansing that would weed all the weak people out of society. Here, he basically says the opposite of what Michaelis believes, which is that society should function like a giant hospital where the strong take care of the weak. The Professor wants to see weak people exterminated, and his speech gives us a pretty spooky prediction of the genocide that Nazi-Occupied Germany would wage a little more than thirty years after this book was published.

In this comment, the Professor says something that sounds a lot like its coming from an Ayn Rand character. He feels that he's spent his life being oppressed by the leeches of society who fail to recognize how much better he is than them. (Don't you just hate it when the leeches are like that?) He refers to himself as a force because he believes that the modern world suffers from a form of inertia, where you get political radicals like Ossipon who just sit around talking instead of actually doing something. In this case, the narrator might actually sympathize with the Professor. But the novel definitely doesn't endorse his insane fantasies as a healthy alternative.

When he's on top of a double-decker bus, the Professor has a really tough time maintaining his belief that he's better than everyone else. This is because he's been faced with a very annoying fact of life: other people exist. Realizing this, he needs to retreat to his room where he can be alone and rebuild the fantasy that he's the only truly great person in the world. The enormous padlock on his cupboard also represents the isolation and sense of protection the Professor gets from being alone. He's basically in a catch-22. He needs other people to acknowledge his greatness, but can't admit to this need without shaking his sense of pride. Here, Conrad really shows the limits of being an egomaniacs, who are always caught between needing acknowledgment from others and trying to be totally independent.

In the closing lines of The Secret Agent, Conrad shows the tensions that make the Professor feel like garbage when he's walking through the street. On the one hand, we hear the guy's got no future. On the other hand, he's supposed to be a "force." The final line tells us that he's deadly, but then it compares him to a pest in a street full of men. One last time, Conrad reveals to us the unavoidable contradiction that'll always torture a man as proud as the Professor. He hates other people and thinks he's greater than them, but still feels small among them. They don't know anything about him. He becomes anonymous in a crowd, just squeezing the little ball in his pocket and thinking about blowing himself up. He'll never have the total confidence his bomb is supposed to give him, because in the end, he needs other people. He needs recognition from them, but he can't admit this need to himself because this would mean admitting to weakness. In a way, it's kind of like being permanently stuck in adolescence.