Gripes

Gripes is the Mookse’s frail, embattled counterpart in an encounter that turns a verbal contest into a parable of unequal power and uncertain perception. He approaches the Mookse with a request to hear about everything, then confesses that he cannot submit or give himself up; by the encounter’s end, a woman carries him from the bank while his opponent is also removed. Gripes is at once a character in this confrontation and a recurring figure for the vulnerable, misread, or defeated party in the book’s cycles of opposition.

Identity and Introduction

Gripes first appears across a stream from the Mookse, whom he sees as a fellow creature in a precarious state. The Mookse is described as parched on the opposite bank, while Gripes himself is presented as dried out and worn down by time. Their opposed positions across the water set the scene’s basic geometry: the two can face one another, but the banks keep them apart, and the passage will not grant either figure a stable command of what is happening.

Gripes addresses his adversary with elaborate deference, calling him “swees Mooksey” and asking whether he will tell him everything about a sequence of obscure subjects. The appeal is both an invitation to conversation and a bid to make the encounter intelligible. The Mookse responds with contempt and self-assertion, but Gripes’s opening posture is not simply defiance: he approaches as a supplicant who seeks knowledge from someone he recognizes as stronger.

The Contest with the Mookse

The Mookse attempts to define the terms of their relation, demanding that Gripes measure his own length and estimate the Mookse’s capacity. He casts the exchange as a test of submission, pressing Gripes to give himself up. Gripes answers that he has been thinking about this very question, but cannot make his submission. The refusal is frail rather than triumphant: he whimpers from a low position and describes his own tumble and limited capacity even as he insists that what belongs to him remains his.

The confrontation is therefore not a simple contest between equal speakers. The Mookse speaks with pomp and claims jurisdiction; Gripes answers from a position of weakness, invoking his own condition and the obscure inheritance of a father who was “bott a pseudowaiter.” His speech cannot overturn the imbalance, but it prevents the Mookse from turning the encounter into an uncontested act of surrender. Gripes’s resistance consists in maintaining a self, however damaged, that the Mookse cannot simply absorb.

The struggle also takes place in a world where comprehension itself is divided. At dusk, the Mookse can see but cannot hear well, while Gripes can hear but can scarcely see. This asymmetry makes their argument more than a dispute over rank: each has access to only part of the scene, and neither possesses a complete account of the other. As darkness deepens, their hopes diverge too. The Mookse anticipates probing depths; Gripes imagines escape if luck allows. Their opposing expectations persist even as their ability to perceive and act diminishes.

Removal and Aftermath

The encounter ends when two women descend to the opposite banks and carry the antagonists away. One gathers up the Mookse and takes him to an invisible dwelling; the other plucks Gripes from his limb and carries his body away to an unseen shelter. The parallel removals give the scene a double ending, but not an equal one: the narrator declares that Gripes “got wrong,” presenting his fate as characteristic of the figure who is repeatedly disadvantaged.

After their removal, only an elm tree and a stone remain. The emptied landscape makes the confrontation seem to have been momentarily inscribed upon the banks, then erased, while the separate shelters leave the antagonists unreconciled. Gripes does not win the contest or secure the explanation he sought. His survival is instead left to the intervention of another figure, and his exit repeats the scene’s larger pattern of vulnerability and uncertain outcome.

Textual and Narrative Significance

Gripes’s episode belongs to a book that repeatedly makes reading, copying, and interpretation unstable. Elsewhere, the narrative imagines a copyist fleeing with a scroll, asks who wrote a difficult document and under what circumstances, and describes a manuscript whose material traces and damaged marks complicate the identification of its writers. These concerns resonate with Gripes’s encounter: he asks for an account of everything, but the scene offers divided senses, obscure speech, and an ending that does not resolve the dispute.

The book also describes a document as bearing many personalities, whose contradictory traits coalesce into one unstable “somebody.” Gripes fits this shifting mode of characterization. He is a particular opponent with a recognizable vulnerability and a refusal to yield, yet his name and fate also lend themselves to recurrence: the narrative calls the defeated party a Gripes and insists that this is how such a figure always was and always will be. His defeat is both a local ending and a pattern that the book can repeat, while the stream-side setting and the incomplete exchange keep that pattern open to further reinterpretation.