39 pages • 1 hour read
Carson McCullersA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
On the morning after the blackjack game, Alison wakes up and discovers the Major chasing Anacleto around the kitchen with a shoe. Anacleto has poured flour and water on the Major’s shoes (presumably as punishment for the night before), which has made the Major late. Alison diffuses the situation by cleaning the boots and showing favor to neither the Major nor Anacleto, then she returns upstairs.
Later, Anacleto joins Alison in her room. Anacleto makes a fire and plays with some of Alison’s trinkets while Alison wonders about Anacleto’s future: “The two of them [...] could perhaps find a way to get along in the world together—but what would he do when she was gone?” (346). She then asks Anacleto if he’s happy, and he answers that he’s happy when she’s well.
Anacleto continues to chatter. He says he used to find it difficult to believe that she knows—he doesn’t specify what it is that Alison knows, but Alison waits patiently for him to finish his line of thought. He says he believes that everyone knows, except for the great Sergei Rachmaninoff (the Russian composer and pianist whose music he and Alison heard last at a concert). He finally explains what he means: “Madame Alison [...] do you yourself really believe that Mr. Sergei Rachmaninoff knows that a chair is something to be sat on and that a clock shows one the time?” (347). Someone as great as Rachmaninoff (or as great as Alison) still lives in a mundane world with chairs and clocks, and Anacleto is astonished at this.
Alison doesn’t answer Anacleto directly. Instead, she reminisces to herself about the concert and asks Anacleto to put on a record. Then Leonora Penderton knocks on the door. Anacleto lets her in, and she reminds Alison of the grand party that she’s throwing that evening. Eventually, Leonora gets bored. However, she feels that etiquette requires her to stay at least an hour, and because she believes that “the tactful topic of conversation in a sickroom was an account of other illnesses” (349), she offers up a gruesome hunting story.
Leonora eventually leaves, and Alison laughs and cries frantically. She then tells Anacleto that she’s going to divorce the Major.
In the afternoon, Captain Penderton goes to the stable and asks Private Williams for Leonora’s horse, Firebird, which he takes for a ride. He lets Firebird gallop and then restrains him; he finds checking the horse’s joy satisfying. After this happens a few times, Firebird begins to run, and the Captain loses hold of the reins. He believes he’s going to fall and die, and mouths the words, “I am lost” (354). Believing this, he suddenly notices the world around him with new wonder and new vividness.
Firebird eventually stops. The Captain beats Firebird with a switch and faints. In his faint, he remembers his childhood, which was cold. His family history is one of “barbarous splendor, ruined poverty, and family hauteur” (355); he bears the weight of that past without ever having been loved for who he is.
The Captain wakes and sees Private Williams two yards away from him, naked and “glisten[ing] in the late sun” (356). The Private steps over the officer and leads Firebird away into the woods. The Captain notices the Private’s physicality and a hatred fills him that is “as passionate as love” and “would be with him all the remaining days of his life” (356). The Captain wanders vaguely back toward home.
Night falls and Leonora throws her party. She enjoys it so much that she doesn’t immediately notice her husband’s absence. Most of her guests have noticed, and it creates an aura of possibly intriguing scandal. The Captain, meanwhile, is at the stable, waiting for Private Williams to return Firebird. Eventually the Private arrives and intensely stares the Captain in the face. The Captain stands outside the stable and watches the Private washing the horse, noticing his “fine, skillful hands and the tender roundness of the soldier’s neck” (359). As he watches, the Captain is overwhelmed with emotion and thinks of wrestling naked with the Private. The Private leaves the stable, and the Captain watches him go. As the Captain gets into his car, he remembers the party at his house.
Later that night, Anacleto arrives home and is very upset about how the party went. The medical board is making their friend Lieutenant Weincheck retire, the Captain arrived and seemed to be in pain, and someone told a vulgar joke that Anacleto hated. He declares that he hates people. Alison silently agrees; for the last five years, she has felt this way about everyone aside from Anacleto, the Lieutenant, and her late baby daughter. Major Langdon is “stupid and heartless,” Leonora Penderton is “nothing but an animal,” and Captain Penderton is “hopelessly corrupt” (360). “What a gang!” she thinks to herself (360).
She looks out the window and sees a man standing outside the Pendertons’ house; she doesn’t know that this is Private Williams and thinks she might be hallucinating. The Major knocks on her door, and she tells him that tomorrow she’s going to tell him something. He leaves, and Alison prepares to sit awake until dawn. This happens because of her many illnesses. Her husband doesn’t believe that she does this, or that she’s ill; she’s sick in so many ways that the Major has stopped believing her.
Her heart begins to beat quickly and erratically at 2am, and she believes that she is going to die. She tries to think about the happiest time in her life. It was when she was 21—eight years prior to the novel’s events—and took a train to Vermont on a summer vacation from her teaching work. She spent time with her pets and made her favorite food and read and sang to herself; no other person was with her.
Alison’s heart stops beating. Anacleto comes into the room and holds her hand. Her heart finally begins beating regularly again. Anacleto, trying to reassure her, brings her a cup of Ovaltine and sets up his watercolor paints. Anacleto tells Alison that he dreamed about nursing Catherine, who then changed into one of the Major’s boots. Alison can’t help but feel intense love and grief; she had Catherine’s body cremated so that it wouldn’t have to exist in a state of decay.
Anacleto begins painting, and the two of them talk briefly about Anacleto’s fantasy of opening a linen shop in Quebec. After a while, Anacleto abruptly crumples up his painting and stares into the fire: “‘Look! […] A peacock of a sort of ghastly green. With one immense golden eye. And in it these reflections of something tiny and—’ ‘Grotesque,’ she finished for him” (366). Something in the tone of her voice makes Anacleto turn around, shout “oh, don’t!” and rush from the table quickly enough to break the water glass on top.
Private Williams is in Leonora Penderton’s room. He is next to her bed and has examined and touched many of her things. He hears the sound of a woman crying (Alison) and then hears a car stop in front of the house. The Private escapes into the woods.
It turns to November. Nobody has noticed the Private’s absence; he is so unsociable that many of the other soldiers don’t know his name. The name he uses in the army is actually a version of his initials: L. G. Williams became “Ellgee Williams” when a sergeant signed him up. Five years ago, in the heat of an argument over some outdoor labor task, L. G. Williams killed a man: “He had felt a certain wondering, numb distress, but there was no fear in him, and not once since that time had the thought shaped definitely in his mind that he was a murderer” (369). Private Williams has this same lack of both fear and definitive thought as he continues his visits to the Penderton house. He continues to watch over “The Lady” in her room and then stands curiously at the study window where the Captain is until the Captain goes upstairs. Instead of realizing that he is a murderer (or an obsessive voyeur in this case), the only thing that the Private realizes during this period of time is that the Captain is following him.
Though he doesn’t understand it, Captain Penderton is increasingly desperate to establish some kind of connection with Private Williams. The Captain feels tormented by this “aching want” and searches for ways to place himself within the vicinity of the Private.
Major Langdon and Leonora Penderton receive little character development in this part; The focus is largely on Alison, the Captain, and the Private. McCullers uses the third-person limited perspective when spotlighting each of these three characters, but the effect in each case is slightly different, which reveals as much about Alison, the Captain, and the Private as their different histories do. Alison recalls memory, and a memory she has chosen to return to: “‘I must think of something pleasant,’ she told herself reasonably” (362), and so she does. Alison has the capacity for self-reflection; she not only remembers a time in her life when she felt better than she does now but thinks about why this was so.
The Private’s history is completely different. His memories don’t elaborate on his false name or linger on the murder he has committed. Instead, the narrative voice abruptly introduces the facts: “Actually the name he used in the army was not his own” (368). There is always a level of distance between the Private and the narrative voice. The narrative voice can’t hover at the Private’s precise point of view like it does with Alison because the Private lacks the capacity to think about these things.
The Captain’s depth of consciousness is somewhere in between Alison’s and the Private’s. He is conscious of his feelings, like Alison and unlike the Private, but he can barely control or analyze them. After beating Firebird with a switch, the captain faints and experiences a memory. He knows he is thinking about his own past, but it comes to him in a vision—unbidden, rather than him choosing it.
By Carson McCullers