The question that remains unsolved, now that we've finished Foe, is why young Susan Barton says to older Susan Barton, "we have the same hand" (76). And perhaps that is the fate of some things, never being solved, merely circled around and around as we grow closer to the truth. Like the buttonhole analogy, part IV of Foe once again circles back to images that we've seen earlier in the novel. They are the same images we’ve seen before, but different. Barton and Foe lie in bed together once again, but are now dead. In Foe, when something is unwrapped, the truth within it is often revealed. Susan and Friday unwrap the dead baby that they find by the side of the road, revealing it beneath cloth. But in part 5, another wrapped thing is mentioned, and this time the narrator “begin[s] to unwrap it, but the scarf is endless” (153). The unwrapping goes on and on, the truth impossible to find.
Humans, over and over, take stabs at the truth. We try to work around it, hoping that by sewing around the buttonhole we'll reveal something that we might not have been able to see otherwise. The young Susan Barton stabs at the truth of herself and her mother, but falls short, managing to reveal only the differences between the two hands when we see them side by side. Foe is so much a novel about truth: the truth of Robinson Crusoe, the truth of Friday’s tongue, but in this scene, part of an incomprehensible chapter, it becomes clear that the truth about some things will never be revealed, only unwrapped endlessly.
I really like the way you worded "perhaps that is the fate of some things, never being told..." It suggests the world has an endless, intangible quality to it. Some things just happen and we do not and cannot know why or how. This idea is embodied by the book. In it, nothing is ever really told or explained as we fruitlessly and endlessly try to unwrap the unwrappable (which is the nature of the world we live in).
ReplyDeleteI really respect that you chose to write your post on the comparison of the hands which is the only instance that no one in class could explain. It sort of became our own little unspeakable buttonhole, and I think that it's awesome that it is finally being discussed. I like your points as well about the inherent similarities that Susan is just unable to see. It compliments the other themes in the novel well.
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