Summary
Shortly before the day of the Greenwich Bomb Outrage, Mrs. Verloc’s mother surprises her by announcing that she has, by lobbying some of her late husband’s connections, secured a place for herself in an almshouse for widows. She has done so in order to relieve Mr. Verloc of the trouble of caring for her so that he may give more attention to her daughter and especially her son. Together with Stevie, Mrs. Verloc takes her mother on a dilapidated carriage with a miserable-looking horse to the almshouse. Stevie becomes pained and outraged by the carriage driver’s whipping the horse. Mrs. Verloc is not able to entirely understand or appease these feelings when she hears Stevie’s monosyllabic exclamations. The two take a bus back home and have dinner with a glum Mr. Verloc. While in bed that night, he tells his wife that he is going off to Europe for a short time.
Analysis
Although we have previously been acquainted with Stevie’s limited intellectual, or expressive, capacity and his exaggerated sense of sympathy for the suffering of his fellow beings, it is especially in this chapter that Conrad gives us a comprehensive view into his mind. Stevie’s personality, posed at the edge of the discursively comprehensible, presents a problem of narration: how does one present the story of a character which normal people – the other characters and the readers included – are not able to understand? Without coloring the narrative as much as William Faulkner famously does through the character of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury, Conrad gives us in painstaking realism Stevie’s attempts to articulate a moral outrage that not only he, due to his disability, is not able to put into words, but which is beyond any of the characters. By using characters such as the carriage driver and Mrs. Verloc who, though they may (in the case of the latter) care deeply for Stevie, refuse to take his emotional responses seriously and search for a deeper meaning and ambiguity in him. “Mrs Verloc wasted no portion of this transient life in seeking for fundamental information” (124).
