Darkness
The veil is obscurity of a mystery. Anything with a view obstructed by a veil has a certain aura of mystery about it and the thicker the veil, the greater the desire to know this mystery. The greatest mystery of all—the thickest veil that mankind ever tries to lift—is death and what lies after. The story commences with a narrator informing the reader of the exact date and method of his own death—which is not by suicide. His description of this quickly approaching end is one obsessed not with trying to stave it off, outrun fate or even figure a way to perhaps lessen the pain, but with what lies beyond. And even as that moment of passing nears with each passing breath, the obsession is focused on the mystery, on what is not known and what cannot be seen. Three paragraphs into the story and the repetition of imagery is revealing about what drives the narrator:
“Darkness—darkness—no pain—nothing but darkness: but I am passing on and on through the darkness: my thought stays in the darkness, but always with a sense of moving onward.”
The Mystery of Bertha
Bertha enters story as the fiancé of the narrator’s brother and ends as the wife who conspires to murder him. From the beginning, he has little good to say about her, noting that her cynicism, sarcastic comments and utter inability to appreciate what is great and good in the world. Nevertheless, he persists. Why? Because he is a man obsessed with the darkness. He wants to penetrate to what lies behind that veil because alone among those occupying a position in the daily orbit around him, she is singularly notable for staying clear of his vision into the future, but one. Having already dismissed that in a fateful miscalculation, he persists and pursues not because of her great beauty and not because of her sparkling personality. Latimer’s entire desire for Bertha is summed up in one single line whose imagery speaks to his fundamental personality flaw:
“She was my oasis of mystery in the dreary desert of knowledge.”
In Latimer’s Place
Latimer is a man who clearly prizes the journey over the destination, the search over the discovery, the rehearsal over the performance. He is a man who loves a mystery. In fact, he loves a mystery so much that he will create one even where it does not exist. He does not love a mystery for the sake of solving it. This may be a difficult concept to understand or empathize with based on the content of his life, but at one point he constructs the concept as concrete image which is far more accessible. To penetrate into what drives Latimer to do conduct his life in a way that can seem quite maddening at times, ponder it from the perspective of the image he offers:
“Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer’s day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate.”
Reanimation
The story comes to a climax on an unexpected left turn in the plot involving a medical experiment in revivifying the corpses within minutes of expiration. The experiment is successful, the dead reanimated, mysteries solved and questions answered. And then just as suddenly as life is brought back so death returns as well, leaving the narrator to ponder over the meaning of the extraordinary scene he has just witnessed:
“…the flame had leaped out…heart-strings had been set to hatred and vengeance; the spirit of life had swept the chords for an instant, and was gone again for ever…Is this what it is to live again . . . to wake up with our unstilled thirst upon us, with our unuttered curses rising to our lips, with our muscles ready to act out their half-committed sins?”
