You funny little man

“You funny little man” is Strickland’s line in The Moon and Sixpence, but in Michael Noonan’s story it ceases to be merely a fictional insult: repeated at moments of grief and uncanny recurrence, it becomes a verbal hinge between Johanna’s death, Michael’s dream, and his return to Sara Laughs.

Source and First Recognition

The line appears as Michael reads a passage in which Strickland’s “injurious calm” provokes Dirk Stroeve to attack him. Stroeve is quickly knocked to the floor, and Strickland dismisses him with the words, “You funny little man.” The scene’s casual humiliation is part of the novel Michael is reading, but the sentence acquires a different force in the room where he reads it.

Michael realizes that Johanna will never turn the page and hear Strickland say it. That recognition brings into focus what he had not truly accepted despite seeing and identifying her corpse on a video monitor, attending her funeral, and hearing “Blessed Assurance” at the graveside. Holding Johanna’s dusty paperback copy, he understands that she is dead. The book, rather than the coffin or the funeral, makes the loss undeniable.

The phrase is fixed in the book by a playing-card bookmark at pages 102 and 103. Michael later describes the marker as leaving the page only a turn of the index finger away from Strickland’s words, now present “now and forever.” The small, ordinary object gives the sentence a precise location he can return to, while also tying it to the moment his grief broke through denial.

From Reading to Dream

After recognizing Johanna’s death, Michael lies on their bed with his forearms crossed over his face and cries himself to sleep. In his dream, he wakes to find the paperback on the coverlet and intends to put it back under the bed where he had found it. The phrase’s power thus persists into a dream organized around the book and the effort to return it to its place.

When Michael later returns to Sara Laughs, the words come back without an evident decision to say them. Stopping on the road by Tidwell’s Meadow, he remembers his dream of Johanna under the bed, shudders, and hears himself utter the phrase. The landscape around him is quiet: Dark Score Lake lies glassy in the afterglow, and he is uncertain whether he will continue to the house or turn back toward Derry. His involuntary repetition gives the line the quality of a verbal refrain carried out of grief and into the journey.

The Voice at Sara Laughs

As Michael walks down the driveway toward the house, the phrase returns in a voice he distinguishes from both his own and Johanna’s. He identifies it as the “UFO voice” that narrated his nightmare and drove him onward even when he wanted to stop: the voice of an outsider. The same words that first belonged to Strickland’s printed speech have now crossed into Michael’s waking experience as an apparently external utterance.

The setting intensifies the recurrence without simply duplicating the dream. Jo’s planters have been restored beside the path to Sara’s beach, and the swimming float is visible offshore; the overturned shape Michael feared seeing by the stoop, however, is absent. The phrase sits amid this mixture of familiar details and missing dream-images, making recognition itself unstable: the scene resembles what Michael dreamed, yet is not identical to it.

On the return, the sentence is one element in a sustained overlap between remembered text, dream, and the apparently haunted house. It does not explain the voice or settle its source. Instead, its recurrence connects a sharply personal memory—the instant Michael accepted Johanna’s death—to the threatening presence that seems to call him onward at Sara Laughs.

Repetition and Significance

The line’s movement is from printed dialogue to private recognition, then from memory into speech and finally into a voice Michael experiences as neither his nor Johanna’s. Each recurrence changes its function. Strickland’s insult first belongs to the fictional scene; for Michael, it becomes inseparable from the book that made bereavement real, and later it marks the uncanny continuity between his nightmare and his return.

The phrase’s repeated form is more significant than any new information it conveys: it binds separate moments without making them identical. A bookmark preserves its place on the page, but Michael’s memory carries the words into a different setting and an altered state of mind. At Sara Laughs, their return suggests that the past is not safely contained in the book or in the dream. The line is a compact verbal thread joining grief to the house’s disturbing summons, while leaving the voice’s ultimate nature unresolved.