Trust

The first chapters of Bonds introduce its two central characters: Benjamin Rask and Helen Brevoort. The shared structure of the first two chapters—a chronology of each family focused on its only children—establishes a parallel between Rask and Helen. They share a similar disposition: intelligent, obedient, and asocial.

The style contributes to the characterization of Helen and in particular Rask. The distant third-person narration and the absence of dialogue and scenes keeps the reader at a remove from the characters’ minds, contributing to their inscrutability. The only line of dialogue in these chapters—the word “I” uttered by Rask when he first meets Helen (53)—is a statement both of his loneliness and of the atomized world the book depicts. In this scene in the room away from the party (which is arguably the only time the narration becomes localized enough to qualify as a scene), Rask and Helen struggle to communicate. More than just nervousness, this interaction hints at the impossibility of either of these characters truly making themselves known to the other. This distance defines their marriage in the coming pages.

Rask’s obsession with investment hints at the theme of Narrative Truth and Finance as Artifice that will come into play in the later sections of the book. Before Rask discovers this lone obsession, he is described as a man without desire: “Those who accused him of being excessively frugal failed to understand that, in truth, he had no appetites to repress” (11). With his mind beyond the reach of the distant third-person narration and without desire, Rask appears inhuman—an empty vessel. This primes his character to personify the inhuman depiction of capital that Bonds presents. The connections that are meaningful to Rask aren’t bonds with people but the matrix of connections he finds in the stock market: “The isolated, self-sufficient nature of speculation spoke to his character and was a source of wonder and an end in itself, regardless of what his earnings represented or afforded him” (16). Thus, the title refers both to interpersonal bonds, or the lack thereof, and to financial bonds as a synecdoche for Rask’s obsession with finance as a whole.

Rask’s relationship to investment also raises the relationship between wealth and morality. The further he delves into the stock market, the further removed he becomes from the world. As he continues investing, he journeys deeper into a self-contained system of abstraction parallel to concrete reality. Unlike reality, capital is clean, which attracts Rask: “[H]e viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean. […] The larger the operation, the further removed he was from its concrete details” (16). Of course, this is only how it appears to Rask; his investments do resound in the real world. For example, at the beginning of World War I, Rask invests heavily in war technology. Though he conducts these investments from a distance without knowledge of their gritty particulars or real-world ramifications, they nonetheless are subject to moral judgment.