Misery

Misery is not a misfortune that can be escaped by changing sides, neighborhoods, or the names given to pain. In the narrator’s account it is both a permanent companion and a force that surfaces through ordinary life, most dramatically when a sentimental stage song exposes the despair its young performers do not know they are voicing. The idea binds private resignation to public performance: people may mistake misery for love, but the performance cannot make it disappear.

Misery as an Inescapable Condition

The narrator begins from the image of a sick person changing sides in bed, then extends the gesture to life itself: people are entitled to move from side to side, and movement is the only defense anyone has found against Fate. It is a defense, not a cure. Misery cannot be dropped somewhere along the road, and the narrator figures it as a dreadful spouse who cannot be killed. The grim alternative is to end up loving her a little rather than spend a lifetime exhausting oneself in futile resistance. The image makes endurance less a triumph than an accommodation to what cannot be removed.

This fatalism does not mean that circumstances are interchangeable or that movement has no immediate value. The narrator quietly leaves his mezzanine lodging in Rancy while the people in the concierge’s lodge sit over wine and chestnuts. They do not notice him pass. Their unawareness gives him a brief release from being known, watched, or harmed by them; he counts three people left behind, including their little daughter Thérèse, whose flea and bedbug bites have left her skin broken out and festering. Yet the escape leads into the unknown, figured as an endless tunnel, not into a life without misery. Flight can sever other people’s claim on him for a moment without undoing the underlying condition.

The Tarapout Performance

At the Tarapout, the narrator has found a temporary, comparatively comfortable berth as a super. For four months he is well dressed, regularly paid, and fed generously; he appears in costumes as a prince, a centurion, and an aviator. The security ends when the company changes the number and assigns him the silent part of a policeman in a sketch set on the London Embankment. The English girls are to sing as if they stood beside the Thames at night. He walks in front of the parapet while their song grows louder, and its lament brings the world’s misery and his own suddenly back into view.

The scene turns on a sharp contrast between the luxurious hall and what the performance releases. The girls laugh and fling out their legs in time with the music, while their song fills the stage with fog, panic, and calamity. The narrator experiences their singing as an almost physical force: it makes his heart burn, seems to age him minute by minute, and cannot be resisted. Their routine is repeated three times a day, with its backdrop and accordion tunes, so the misery is not a passing accident of one performance. The repeated entertainment becomes the channel through which suffering insists on being heard.

Love as Misery’s Disguise

The girls believe they are singing about a small setback in love. The narrator sees a profound mismatch between their understanding and what their voices convey: they sing the calamity of existence while mistaking it for love trouble, because, in his bitter account, the young have not been taught another name for suffering. Their eyes are sad, but their awareness does not extend to the meaning of what they perform. The scene therefore makes ignorance part of the pathos: the performers give misery expression without recognizing it.

The narrator describes the young as trying to place all humanity into one imagined beloved, a dream of perfect love. Against that rosy expectation he sets the future engulfment of all sixteen English girls by the hardship of their country. Misery, he insists, is already upon them: it grips their bodies and breath and runs through their thin, off-key voices. No costume, spangles, lights, or smile can disguise it. The stage does not create the suffering so much as reveal a truth already lodged in the performers, even as they continue to sing hopeful songs while waiting their turn.

The Meaning and Force of the Concept

The Tarapout episode sharpens the narrator’s broader claim that unhappiness can become an amusement. The audience receives a routine, the performers continue their part, and misery passes through the spectacle without anyone being able to master it. This is why the narrator rejects love songs as false consolation: love itself, in his formulation, is misery speaking through people’s mouths. The claim is not offered as a detached definition but as the conclusion forced on him by the performance’s collision of cheerful movement, romantic pretence, and unmistakable despair.

Across the lodging-house departure and the theatre scene, misery persists under contrasting conditions. In Rancy, escape is a quiet act of slipping away from people who bite, pry, or do harm; at the Tarapout, suffering erupts in a public act that continues despite the narrator’s foreboding. Both scenes deny the possibility of simply stepping outside misery. A person can change sides, leave a room, or wear a costume, but the journey carries the condition onward, and the performance may expose it even when those caught inside it call it love.