(no subject)

[regshoe]

Originally posted here on Tumblr.

So, this conversation:

And, while I was about it, I told him much more. Eloquently enough, I daresay, I gave him chapter and verse of my hopeless struggle, my inevitable defeat; for hopeless and inevitable they were to a man with my record, even though that record was written only in one’s own soul. It was the old story of the thief trying to turn honest man; the thing was against nature, and there was an end of it.

Raffles entirely disagreed with me. He shook his head over my conventional view. Human nature was a board of chequers; why not reconcile one’s self to alternate black and white? Why desire to be all one thing or all the other, like our forefathers on the stage or in the old-fashioned fiction? For his part, he enjoyed himself on all squares of the board, and liked the light the better for the shade. My conclusion he considered absurd.

“But you err in good company, Bunny, for all the cheap moralists who preach the same twaddle: old Virgil was the first and worst offender of you all. I back myself to climb out of Avernus any day I like, and sooner or later I shall climb out for good.”

These views (and I think they’re both being honest here about what they really think, which of course is not necessarily the same thing as being right about themselves) are really interesting in the context of what happens now and later on. It’s made fairly clear (and stated explicitly in ‘Out of Paradise’) that for Bunny at least, the centre of his ‘struggle’ is not crime itself but Raffles. He may not be able to stay away now, but he gives up crime once Raffles is gone. I wonder how much he realised that, at this point? He doesn’t seem to have said so to Raffles, in any case—but then, he wouldn’t.

As for Raffles, he’s conflating two different things here, apparently without realising it. There’s his ‘alternate black and white’, which I think does describe him pretty well, and he does seem reconciled to it; but giving up crime altogether and 'climb[ing] out of Avernus’ is another thing entirely, and a much more doubtful one. He never does manage it, at least not permanently—he may have been an ‘absolutely honest man’ for eight months in Naples, but could he have done it for ever?

Tags: he thinks he could, and so does bunny, which is interesting but not necessarily true