“Owing to its rarity, perhaps, any external event, however, trivial, always made me feel as though some radical change in my life were at hand” (Meagan Adler)

After tonight’s reading, we experience the emotional struggle the narrator endures as he is humiliated by his constant exposure of his inferiority in society.  I think that he feels this way because he is unable to socially connect with any person, for he is incapable of accepting anyone who is unlike himself.   As he said, he is a “tyrant at heart” (pg.47), for he wanted to exercise “unbounded sway” (pg.47) over the one friend he might have had.  I was particularly intrigued at the end of the reading, when the narrator sees the girl with the “rather pale face” (pg.59) in the dark shop and observes that “no one of those fools had noticed her” (pg.60); it is at this point that we see the potential connection the narrator can develop with her, for he too feels like a nobody.  A particularly powerful part of tonight’s reading was when the narrator expresses, “Owing to its rarity, perhaps, any external event, however, trivial, always made me feel as though some radical change in my life were at hand” (pg.47); I think that it is at points like these that we see the significance of external forces to the narrator, as they momentarily interfere with his acute and inescapable consciousness.