The Exterminator

The Exterminator is both a pest-control worker and, in his present assignment, an agent tasked with finding and eliminating living “molds.” His account turns the familiar work of fumigation into a model for political surveillance: the targets are no longer insects or vermin but suspected defectors within an uncertain network. The role’s significance lies in that shift, and in the way his confidence that agents betray one another makes the supposed work of control seem inseparable from fear of betrayal.

Identity and Earlier Work

The Exterminator recalls having exercised his literal trade at a brief point of intersection. He describes treating roaches with pyrethrum powder, removing bedbugs from rose-patterned wallpaper in shabby North Clark theatrical hotels, and poisoning a rat he identifies as a danger to human babies. The account gives his title a practical origin: extermination was once directed at pests, using recognizable tools and paid services. His aside that the powder is difficult to obtain because of wartime conditions, followed by an offer to provide some for two dollars, keeps this earlier work grounded in scarcity and commerce.

That history does not explain how he became an agent, and the text supplies no fuller biography. Instead, the change appears through the contrast between his past pest-control work and his present assignment. The same occupational word now covers an expanded target and a different kind of authority: he is to find living entities designated as “molds,” not to dispose of bodies. The distinction is central to his account, even as he admits that the person he addresses may not understand it.

The Present Assignment

The Exterminator describes his current task as finding the living and eliminating the “molds.” He says that only a very few remain, but even one could disrupt the agents’ “food tray.” That image makes the threat sound both small in number and intolerable in consequence: the mission is presented as preventive containment, not as a response to a clearly described act. The passage does not identify what the “molds” are in concrete terms, leaving the assignment’s language opaque even as its urgency is asserted.

His list of dangers includes defecting agents: A.J., the Vigilante, the Black Armadillo, Lee, the Sailor, and Benway. He singles out the Black Armadillo with a parenthetical reference to Chagas vectors and an Argentine epidemic, connecting the agent’s name to disease-carrying insects. That detail recalls the Exterminator’s earlier dealings with vermin while also showing how biological danger and political suspicion run together in his vocabulary. The enemy is not simply outside the system: the danger, he insists, comes from within it, from agents who change sides.

The Exterminator’s account ends by turning the threat back upon himself. He knows, he says, that an agent is somewhere in the darkness looking for him, because all agents defect and all resisters sell out. The declaration offers no secure distinction between loyal agent and opponent. His assignment depends on finding traitors, but his own rule makes betrayal universal; the pursuit therefore appears to have no stable endpoint and no position of safety.

The Exterminator as a Recurring Figure

Elsewhere, the Sailor refers to the Exterminator’s work as fumigation for “coke bugs,” explaining that a trap has not been aired since the treatment. The Sailor later remarks that the Exterminator does a good job, almost too good. These short references establish that the character’s reputation circulates beyond his own account and that his pest-control services have affected another character’s environment. They also give the title a double register: it remains a practical trade even as the Exterminator’s own description recasts extermination as covert work against agents.

At the book’s later intersection of characters, the Exterminator appears in a list that also includes the Vigilante, the Rube, Lee, A.J., Clem and Jody, Hassan, the Sailor, Andrew Keif, Fats Terminal, Benway, and Schafer. The passage imagines these figures eventually saying the same thing in the same words, occupying the same position in space-time, and becoming one person through a shared vocal apparatus and its bodily processes. The Exterminator is thus not given a separate resolution there; he is folded into a formal convergence that unsettles the boundaries between individual identities. His earlier certainty that agents change sides resonates with this later instability, though the text does not explain the relationship between the two passages as a literal plot mechanism.

Narrative Role and Significance

The Exterminator’s passages juxtapose concrete labor with an increasingly abstract language of enemies, agents, and molds. Details such as pyrethrum powder, bedbug treatment, fumigation for “coke bugs,” and the two-dollar offer keep the role attached to ordinary services. Against that material background, the present assignment enlarges the meaning of extermination until it describes a campaign against living members of a hidden network. The shift makes his occupation a compact image of a world in which administrative or political control borrows the language and habits of pest removal.

His narrative presence also remains deliberately limited. The account names targets and declares a threat, but does not establish the full structure of the organization, the nature of the “molds,” or whether the Exterminator’s claims are reliable. Rather than resolving those uncertainties, the later convergence places him among characters whose identities and speech can collapse into one another. He functions less as a fully narrated life than as a recurring position in the book’s shifting field of agents, threats, and unstable selves.