The Narrator and the “Poor Aunt” in “The Story of the Poor Aunt”

The narrator’s relationship with the Poor Aunt in “The Story of the Poor Aunt” turns an uncanny attachment into a question about language and identity. She first appears as a small, nearly weightless presence on his back, but the narrator eventually understands her as the phrase “poor aunt” taking on different forms in different minds. When she disappears without his noticing, the loss does not restore a secure original self: he is left unsure who he has become.

An Unexplained Attachment

The narrator first becomes aware of the Poor Aunt in the middle of August. Nothing announces her arrival; one day, he simply feels that she is there, stuck to his back. She is little and not especially heavy, does not breathe bad breath across his shoulder, and is barely visible unless someone looks carefully. The relation is intimate in its physical placement but oddly undemanding in its first effects: her presence is not unpleasant, and the narrator does not describe her as a burden he must immediately escape.

The narrator’s cats eye her suspiciously for a few days, then accept her once they understand that she poses no threat to their territory. His friends respond less easily. While they sit together drinking, the Poor Aunt peeks over his shoulder, unsettling some of them. The contrast makes the attachment both private and social: the narrator feels her directly, but the people around him register her through their own reactions and perceptions.

A Presence Made of Words

Because the narrator cannot see the figure on his own back, he learns about her appearance from other people. Their accounts do not describe a single stable aunt. One friend sees his dead Akita, which had died the previous fall from cancer of the esophagus after fifteen years of life. The narrator concludes that the presence is not one fixed image but a kind of ether that changes shape according to each observer’s mental picture. The Poor Aunt is therefore not simply an object the narrator carries; she is a point where different people’s memories and associations become visible to them.

The narrator rejects the explanation that she is a ghost or a spirit lurking somewhere and possessing him. His account instead begins with a word: repeatedly sending the same stimulus through a word, he says, produces a response, although the response differs for each person. In his case, that response feels like an independently existing presence, as if the words had swollen into a thing inside him. What clings to his back, he explains, is ultimately the phrase “poor aunt,” without meaning or form of its own—a conceptual sign. The explanation does not deny that the observers see something; it distinguishes the sign from the various images and meanings that arise around it.

This account makes the narrator both the Poor Aunt’s bearer and the person trying to explain how she exists. He experiences an independent presence, while insisting that what gives it shape belongs to the minds of those who encounter the phrase. The gap between the narrator’s bodily certainty and his abstract explanation remains central to their relationship: she feels real on his back even as he describes her as words without inherent form.

Time, Pressure, and Perfection

The narrator’s understanding of the Poor Aunt changes from a curious attachment into an image of time’s violence. Time, he reflects, strikes everyone, but its blows are delivered with such frightful gentleness that few people notice the beating. In the Poor Aunt, by contrast, he can see time’s tyranny as if looking through an aquarium window. The confined image of her being squeezed like an orange until no juice remains gives his sense of the relation a sharper meaning: she embodies attrition made perceptible.

What draws the narrator to her is not simply suffering but the completeness he sees in her. He calls that completeness an utter perfection, and figures it as a corpse sealed inside a glacier of stainless-steel-like ice. Only ten thousand years of sunshine could melt the glacier, yet the Poor Aunt cannot live for ten thousand years. She must live, die, and be buried with her perfection intact. The narrator’s attachment thus carries an unresolved tension: he is drawn to an image made complete by time’s crushing pressure, while recognizing that the perfection offers no escape from death.

Disappearance and Uncertain Selfhood

The Poor Aunt leaves as quietly as she came. By the time the narrator exits the train, a cold winter wind is blowing, and he has been thinking about whether to buy a new coat. He descends the stairs and passes through the gate before realizing that she is no longer on his back. He cannot identify when she vanished. As with her arrival, the change happens without a marked event or anyone’s notice; she has gone back to wherever she originally existed.

Her departure does not simply return the narrator to a settled life before the attachment. He says that he is his original self again, but immediately questions what that original self was. The remaining person seems to be another self, one strongly resembling the original but not securely identical with it. He feels alone, like a blank signpost in the middle of a desert, and without a sense of direction. The Poor Aunt’s disappearance therefore changes the meaning of her earlier presence: once she is gone, the narrator cannot be certain that the self she had been attached to is recoverable.

In their relationship, physical closeness does not produce mutual recognition or a stable bond. The narrator cannot see the Poor Aunt, observers give her different forms, and her unexplained departure offers no clear account of what she was. Yet the attachment leaves a consequence that outlasts it: the narrator’s confidence in his own identity has been unsettled. The story makes the Poor Aunt at once a word, an image shaped by other minds, and a figure through which the narrator confronts time’s pressure and the difficulty of returning unchanged to himself.