According to Stein, the esteemed entomologist, Jim’s problem is an inability to match his deeds with his romantic notions. It’s not so much that he jumps ship and violates the moral code, but that he fails his own ideals.
Stein sits in a wunderkammer, surrounded by beetles and butterflies. Chapter XX takes on a gothic cast: shallow pools of light, “the graves of butterflies,” endless hallways, mirrors and flickering candles. The German entomologist, after exulting in the beauty and fragility of the butterfly, says, “We want in so many different ways to be.” The only way to save ourselves from ourselves is Hamlet’s cure, notes Stein: “Or not to be.”
I hover on the edge of this cut-rate exegesis. I want to admit my own faults, my own weakness. I find myself at the end of Stein’s pronouncement, “I tell you, my friend, it is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough.”
It’s in these shadowy halls that they ponder Jim’s “to be.” Perhaps it’s a hypothetical one, or perhaps it’s one that results from that strange gothic milieux: is he? This question of existence is hard to grapple, rather like those flickering shadows. We’ll leave it now, maybe it will become more tangible.
Stein and Marlow end on the subject of dreams, those achieved and those let go. Stein is a success, Jim is a failure. Jim seems to wait for an opportunity (and so do I!), and Stein has a biography that asserts that he did not. But his own admission, he too has let things go.
