Description

First paragraph:

At the end of Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” John Marcher decides that he has done nothing with his life—but the truth is that he had once accomplished something rather noteworthy with his life, namely, he acquired an autonomous identity for himself, only this acquisition did not come cheap. The price Marcher pays for individuating is his suspicion, his fear, that he is fated for an encounter with a Beast quite capable of destroying him. He pretends to hunt the Beast; but since he likely feels he deserves to be struck down by its attack, fears of retribution have him thinking more of evasion and reparation than of combat. So even though it will mean the loss of the considerable bounty that individuation had provided him with, Marcher ultimately decides to return to a symbiotic relationship to someone he felt he had once terribly wronged, in hopes that he might thereby forestall catastrophe.