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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
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... he fought his overwhelming self-hatred. In each stinking wave of it he remembered some disgusting happening of his life.
He thought, I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again.
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I see just a glimmer of redemption for him in that moment of self-realisation. Sadly it was probably too late for him to be forgiven by Iris for his betrayal of her and of the game.
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Poor Roy; he's a slow learner. He did take away something from Iris after all. She said to him during their evening at the lake:
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"We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the lfe we live with after that. Suffering is what brings us toward happiness."
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Frankly, I thought that a little ham-handed and overly explicit, but to the extent there's a message in the book, there it is.
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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
Harriet's talk with Roy after he defeated the Whammer is full of classical allusions, and she asks Roy if he had ever read Homer. (Maybe that's issybird's link to Paris and Helen and the Trojan War.) After their talk,
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Roy worried out some other things he might have said but had no confidence to put them into words. He felt curiously deflated and a little lost, as if he had just flunked a test. The worst of it was he still didn't know what she'd been driving at.
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Thanks for picking up the Trojan War reference! And again, this shows that he does learn; he rejected what Iris had to say, but, unlike with Harriet, he understood her.
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"I had it up to here." He ran a finger across his windpipe.
"Had what?"
"What I suffered--and I don't want any more."
"It teaches us to want the right things."
"All it taught me is to stay away from it. I am sick of all I have suffered."
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