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real exploiter in the book. He exploits the niece, using her physical
labor for his convenience, thus in a sense abusing her body (Falk wants
to marry the girl, not to rape her-he respects the cultural binding of
the sexual drive). Although when he first hears Falk's story Hermann
hysterically dismisses his proposal of marriage, he soon moves from
hysteria to prudence and allows the girl to go because she is about to
turn from an asset (free labor) into a liability (a mouth to feed).
Hermann can also be cruel, devious, and mean. Although everything is
so tidy and spotless on his ship this is only part of the economic system
to which he is totally committed. For example, his ship is so clean it is
said to look as if it had been "explored with toothbrushes." This is not
an idle simile for in a way his bourgeois establishment is a kind of
mouth, a clean mouth but a mouth nevertheless and Hermann is in one
way a much more insidious and dishonest kind of "consumer" than
Falk. His reaction to Falk's opening statement-"Imagine to yourself
that I have eaten man"-is notable. He says "What for?," then later
shrieks out "Beast," and still later says to the narrator "Why tell? Who
was asking him"; utilitarianism, defensive abuse, the preference for
concealment-this is the bourgeois mind.
The narrator stands in a different relationship to Falk. For one
thing his position is in some ways oddly parallel to the one held by
Falk. His ship is in trouble, morale is collapsing, men are ill and
indeed nearly dying. In addition he has been robbed of his savings–
just as for Falk, in another sense, there was finally nothing left for him
to draw on. In any case the narrator responds sympathetically to Falk's
story with an "'Ah' of complete enlightenment," This is why
he
has to
take up "the role of an ambassador," as he puts it, between Falk and
Hermann: the two men live in different countries of the mind and of
character. Hermann's ship is said to be "world-proof," Falk looks like
a man "who has fallen out of the world." The narrator is truly
mundane, trying to be in the world as it is, neither refusing it nor
having had to step out of it. Hence he is the necessary point of
intersection; he is qualified to be the true narrator and translator. The
niece, who never speaks, responds to Falk's story in total silence with
total attention, and tears of pure sympathy, is for her part the true
listener. She is willing to take in-assimilate-what Falk had, in a
more literal sense, had to assimilate. Hermann wants to extrude it; she
can swallow it. That is why she is an appropriate mate for Falk. In
these and many other ways, all the main characters are involved in
diHerent kinds of hunger, different kinds of devouring and assimilat–
ing, different kinds of telling and listening.
