Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 5, 2025
He is enough to prove finally how far the intricate performance of thought is beyond the power of a man to record in his own language. Nine-tenths of Strether's thought nine-tenths, that is to say, of the silvery activity which makes him what he is would be lost but for the fact that its adventures are caught in time, while they are proceeding, and enacted in the book.
His part in the effect is no more than that of the playwright, who vanishes and leaves his people to act the story; only instead of men and women talking together, in Strether's case there are innumerable images of thought crowding across the stage, expressing the story in their behaviour. But there is more in the book, as I suggested just now, than Strether's vision and the play of his mind.
She fitted to them all an answer for Strether's last question. The solid stranger was simply the answer as she now, turning to her friend, indicated. She brought it straight out for him it presented the intruder. "Why, through this gentleman!" The gentleman indeed, at the same time, though sounding for Strether a very short name, did practically as much to explain.
When it comes to Strether's treatment of this material, however, when it is time to learn what he makes of it, turning his experience over and over in his mind, then his own point of view no longer serves. How is anybody, even Strether, to see the working of his own mind?
"Not being able to marry is all they've with any confidence to look forward to. A woman a particular woman may stand that strain. But can a man?" he propounded. Strether's answer was as prompt as if he had already, for himself, worked it out. "Not without a very high ideal of conduct. But that's just what we're attributing to Chad.
Strether's interest grew. "Then why does she want you at home?" "Because when you hate you want to triumph, and if she should get me neatly stuck there she WOULD triumph." Strether followed afresh, but looking as he went. "Certainly in a manner.
But though in The Ambassadors the point of view is primarily Strether's, and though it appears to be his throughout the book, there is in fact an insidious shifting of it, so artfully contrived that the reader may arrive at the end without suspecting the trick.
With the one she had now picked up in her hands there need be at least no waste of wonder. "She's coming to see me that's for YOU," Strether's counsellor continued; "but I don't require it to know where I am." The waste of wonder might be proscribed; but Strether, characteristically, was even by this time in the immensity of space. "By which you mean that you know where SHE is?"
How indeed then she must cared, in answer to which Strether's entertainer dropped a comprehensive "Ah!" expressive perhaps of some impatience for the time he took to get used to it. She herself had got used to it long before. When one morning within the week he perceived the whole thing to be really at last upon him Strether's immediate feeling was all relief.
There was a depth in it, to Strether's ear, of confirmed luxury almost a kind of unconscious insolence of proprietorship; but the effect of the glimpse was not at this moment to foster speculation: there was something so conclusive in so much graceful and generous assurance. It was in fact a fresh evocation; and the evocation had before many minutes another consequence.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking