Independent Reading Entry 8

Percy, Walker
10/2/08

The thrilling conclusion of the book reveals the reasons for his institutionalization. He makes a final decision to get concrete proof of his wife's cheating and moves into the bedroom where she and a possible lover are staying for the night of the hurricane. He wanders around the property in the furious winds beforehand and you get a sense of the chaos going on outside to compare to the chaos going on inside. He moves slowly into a dark room and hears both the winds howling and another howling. Percy does a good job at writing to put us in Lance's trauma and confusion with the inability to distinguish the two types of howls going on. He then moves farther into the room to discover a "beast with two backs." Once he sees this he pushes himself down onto the two of them and wraps his arms around them which was an incredibly powerful image of pain displayed by him. He never actually says his feelings he just sort of tells us what happened and the physical things that were occurring. This reinforced the whole numbness that has been displayed throughout the whole boo but it also made it more powerful because of the intensity of the scene. He still feels nothing when one of the worst things imaginable is witnessed. He starts to fight with the man, with a continued numb apathetic description, and he ends up on top of him with the man laying under him on his stomach. They chat a little while the man attempts to calm him down. Lance however is unmoved and Percy writes this so effortlessly. The man is about to tell Lance what he believes is the issue but "we never heard what he was going to say because i was slitting his throat." That is literally how the murder is written. It is incredibly intense.