Fiction as Fantasy: The Unreliable Narrator in The Moon and Sixpence

^¿gs^tow ^Γ~ "% Fiction as Fantasy: The Unreliable Narrator in The Moon and Sixpence Sheldon W. Liebman Lewis University TO MOST CRITICS, the central figure in Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence (1919) is Charles Strickland.1 The narrator's putative purpose is to examine Strickland's life and work in order to determine his real nature. The primary function of the other characters in the novel is to throw some light on the painter's personality, and these partial illuminations help the narrator in his attempt to explain Strickland 's motivation. Like Conrad's Kurtz, Strickland remains a mystery until the end of the novel, when the narrator says to Captain Brunot, one of the last Europeans to see Strickland alive, "I wonder if you have found the explanation of a character which seemed to me inexplicable."2 Beginning at the periphery, the narrator travels from one point of view to another, always, in his quest for enlightenment, moving closer and closer to the center. Like Conrad's Marlow, he emerges at the end with a far deeper understanding of his subject than he started with. Returning to Strickland's wife in the final chapter, after voyaging to the painter's heart of darkness, Tahiti, the narrator even reenacts Marlow's visit to Kurtz's fiancée, allowing Mrs. Strickland to think and say what she wants about her now-famous husband, just as Marlow refuses to contradict the idealized version of Kurtz retained by his "Intended." In this view, Strickland's life and death teach the narrator the same lesson that Dirk Stroeve should have learned under the same tutelage: "What a cruel and practical joke old Nature played when she flung so many contradictory elements together, and left the man face to face with 329 ELT 38:3 1995 the perplexing callousness of the universe."3 Human beings are unpredictable . Nature is cruel. And, ultimately, whether one lives or dies is inconsequential: "It seemed to me cruel that [the happy life of Dirk and Blanche Stroeve] should have been broken to pieces by a ruthless chance; but the cruellest thing of all was that in fact it made no great difference. The world went on, and no one was a penny the worse for all that wretchedness."4 The only thing that endures is the truth of art, which is expressed in the still-life by Strickland in the possession of Dr. Coutras. The painting suggests that to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge might reveal "the secrets of the soul" but might also transform a person into a beast or a god. The narrator does not submit to the temptation, nor does he discover the "secret" that Strickland took to his grave. But the effect of this moment of illumination is the same for him as it is for Marlow: "The horror! The horror!" He has stepped over the edge of madness and into the depths of both human and nonhuman reality. The "spell" of this enchantment is broken by "the loud, cheerful voice of Madame Coutras," but the experience evidently makes a lasting impression on the narrator, whose tragic sense of life is deepened by this culminating revelation of darkness.5 Yet, despite his claim to have acquired the knowledge and experience sufficient to teach him these verities, the narrator need not be taken at his word. Indeed, his principal activity throughout the novel is not observation, analysis, and discovery, but speculation, interpretation, and judgment. From the beginning to the end of The Moon and Sixpence, the narrator conjectures, "fancies," predicts. He guesses at everyone's intentions and raises suspicions about their motives. Furthermore, because many of his surmises are wrong, his view of all of the characters is put into question. Thus, when the narrator blithely says, "There is no last word," he may be revealing more about his own estimate of Strickland and his endeavor to set the record straight than about the world of letters in early twentieth-century London. And when he says at the end of the novel that "the devil could always quote scripture to his purposes," he may be inadvertently suggesting something about his own...