Chapter 4

Jiaying Su & Jenny Tran

Summary

• Jack recalls his Ph. D dissertation on Cass Mastern, his father’s uncle. – Cass Mastern ultimately writes a journal as a self-

evaluation of his morals. • He feels guilty about his adulterous affair with

Annabelle Trice because it ultimately leads to the suicide of Duncan Trice, her husband.• He wants to redeem himself by becoming an

abolitionist.

Characters

• Jack Burden– Present-Jack is recalling his past, using apologetics to justify

his actions.– He strives to comprehend Cass Mastern’s philosophy and

search for a purpose of life.• At this time, present-Jack and past-Jack are afraid to comprehend

Cass’s motivation and definition of the world.

• Cass Mastern– Through his journal and self-evaluation, Cass realizes that

the world “is all of one piece” and that every action and decision of mankind is profoundly connected, like an intricate web.

Themes

• Responsibility is a burden.– Jack is afraid to understand Cass Mastern’s

philosophy of the world; he is afraid that Cass will refute everything in Jack’s invented world.

• “The world is all of one piece”.– Every action and decision affects everyone.

• The Past transcends Time. – Jack cannot evade the past because they continue

to affect his present.

Diction• Concrete Diction

– Jack explains the difficulties of comprehending this, for although he could read Cass Mastern’s physical journal and words, “[the journal] could only be words to him”; the philosophies and ideals were intangible to him

– Although he left his sheltered world and everything behind, he meticulously describes the physical objects he left behind: “the pine table”, “the black books”, “the ring”, “the photograph”, “the packet of letters”, “the thick stack of manuscript”.

• Informal Diction– The usage of informal diction allows Jack Burden to oversimplify and convey his thoughts to

his audience, and the usage of rhetorical questions at vital locations serves to aid in the victimization of the past-Jack’s predicament, as the present-Jack repeatedly asks, “But how could Jack Burden, being what he was, understand that?”

– He refers to “you”, the audience, in order to place the audience into Jack’s perspective

• Cacophonous Diction– The hard “c”, “k”, and “t” sounds

• There are certain vital words that aid to bolster the meaning of the sentence, for they bolster materialism and the idea of tangibility. Jack uses the words “accumulation”, “items”, “broken”, “dust-shrouded”, and “garret” in order to physically show his ignorance.

Imagery• Similes

– Cass learns that the "world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly... at any point the spider feels the tingle”.

– The spider has "glittering eyes like mirrors in the sun, or like God's eye”– The present Jack describes how after his failure to understand Cass, he

would "plunge deeper and deeper into sleep like a diver groping downward into dark water, feeling for something which may be there and which glitter if there were any light...but there isn't light”.

• Metaphors– “The world then was simply an accumulation of items, odds and ends of

things, like the broken and misused and dust shrouded things gathered in a garret”.

Imagery

• Personification – “The night was filled with a slow, sad, susurrous rustle, like the

wind fingering the pines”.– When Jack describes his experiences during the Great Sleep, he

recalls the "bearing sounds of the world sneaking and sleeping back into the room".

• Alliteration– “Slow, sad, susurrous rustle”– “Small sounds of the world sneaking and seeping back”.

• Assonance – “Through the glass, through the cracks in the wall, through the

very pores of wood and plaster”.

Details• Jack in the end of the passage mentions that the “black books in which

the journal was written, the ring, the photograph, the packet of letters were left there unopened”.

• The landlady sent Jack “a big parcel, collect, containing the stuff he had left on the little pine table. The parcel unopened, travelled around him from furnished room to furnished room, to the apartment where he lived with his beautiful wife Lois..with the brown paper turning yellow and the cords sagging, and the name Mr. Jack burden fading slowly”.

• Other details that Jack includes is what is written in Cass's papers, which consists of "a lonely plantation house after Cass Mastern had freed his slaves ...by the candle light in the hotel room in Vicksburg after the conversation with Jefferson Davis or by the dying campfire in some bivouac while the forms of men lying stretched on the ground...the breath of thousands of men".

Language• Obscure Language vs. Concrete Language

– Obscure: Jack strives to comprehend the interrelationships within the world, which to him seems like a “flux of things before his eyes (or behind his eyes) and one thing had nothing to do, in the end, with anything else”.

– Concrete: He attempts to understand Cass’s world; Jack ultimately fails to comprehend Cass because to him, Cass’s journal “could only be words to him”, for to him, the world’s worth was measured through materialism.

• Detached Language– Third-person omniscient: “I [present-Jack] have said that Jack Burden [past-Jack] could not put

down the facts about Cass Mastern’s world because he did not know Cass Mastern…But I [present-Jack] (who am what Jack Burden became) look back now, years later, and try to say why”.

– Second-person narrator: “He learned that the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tingle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide. It does not matter whether or not you meant to brush the web of things”.

• Rhetorical Questions– He utilizes rhetorical questions at vital locations to pacify and justify his thoughts and actions,

repeatedly asking “But how could Jack Burden, being what he was, understand that?”

Syntax• Parallel Structure with Interrupted Syntax

– In the first instance, Jack utilizes syntax to physically represent the world in his analogy to the spider web, explaining that “the world is like an enormous spider web and if you touch it, however lightly, at any point, the vibration ripples to the remotest perimeter and the drowsy spider feels the tangle and is drowsy no more but springs out to fling the gossamer coils about you who have touched the web and then inject the black, numbing poison under your hide”.

– Jack describes his “Great Sleep”, a method of evading the real world; he explains that “he would sleep twelve hours, fourteen hours, fifteen hours, feeling himself, while asleep, plunge deeper and deeper into sleep like a diver groping downward into dark water feeling for something which may be there and which would glitter if there were any light in the depth, but there isn’t any light”.