Finny, the English Department Instructor’s brief breakdown begins when he stops taking his medication while fleeing his marriage, and ends with his hospitalization and return to the classroom. In William Henry Devereaux, Jr.’s recollection, the episode turns a private attempt at freedom into a vivid, public upheaval, followed by medical intervention and a cautious restoration of appearances.

Background and the Decision to Stop Medication

The episode takes place during the final days of the Vietnam War. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. speculates that the American withdrawal from Southeast Asia may have influenced Finny’s decision to flee his marriage; Finny’s apparent reasoning was that if he could do without his wife, he might also be able to do without his medication. The narrative marks this inference as uncertain, but the consequence is plain: Finny misjudges what stopping his medication will bring.

Before describing the breakdown, the recollection situates it against Finny’s later conduct. After returning to medication and the closet, he maintained strict appearances, often arriving at department functions with a female companion. Her presence seemed intended to counter the department’s memory of his two-week career as a transvestite. The contrast makes the episode’s temporary freedom inseparable from the effort to contain and conceal it afterward.

The Two-Week Breakdown

On the first day without medication, Finny became unusually garrulous and good-natured, and appeared to be wearing eyeliner and mascara. On the second, after the medication had flushed from his system, he appeared in full regalia: a black satin dress, pearls, and high heels. He strode through the long hallways of the Modern Languages Building, loudly blessing people and urging them to open their windows. The exuberance was striking, but its physical details also register how exposed and unstable the episode was: from unsteady heels, Finny’s rapture brought tears to his eyes and made his mascara run.

Finny described his release as letting out a dragon to fly away and lay waste to other kingdoms. The image casts the episode as liberation, but the reactions around him show that it was also a disturbance he could not simply direct. Teddy Barnes, then department chair, locked himself in his office and refused to come out. Paul Rourke threatened Finny when he entered his office, while June Barnes answered with a practical warning about wearing pearls before five. Billy Quigley, usually unsympathetic toward Finny, welcomed him, offered him a seat and a belt from his flask, and made a rough joke about his appearance. The responses range from fear and hostility to deadpan advice and camaraderie; none could make Finny’s freedom last.

Hospitalization and Return

By the time the last marine was evacuated from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, Finny’s soon-to-be ex-wife had arranged for him to be hospitalized and drugged. The intervention ended the brief period of exuberance and returned him to male attire and what the narration pointedly calls disheartened heterosexuality. After a month-long convalescence, Finny went back to the classroom in the Modern Languages Building.

His return is marked by a sharp change in tone. He brought half a dozen new exercises on the distinction between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses, the kind of material that thereafter defined his classroom routine. The narrator says Finny caused no further problems, except for his arrogant incompetence and the extreme tedium of his teaching. The dry qualification refuses a simple recovery narrative: the immediate crisis had passed, but the person who returned was presented through the narrow, unflattering routines of academic life.

Narrative Significance

The event is structured around a reversal in the meaning of release. Finny’s own dragon image makes stopping medication sound like an escape into expansive possibility; the episode’s rapid end, hospitalization, and return to guarded appearances show the cost and limits of that freedom. The black satin dress, pearls, heels, and running mascara make the change visible, while the reactions of colleagues turn a personal crisis into a department-wide spectacle.

The episode is recalled retrospectively by William Henry Devereaux, Jr., whose account combines concrete description with uncertainty about Finny’s motives and wry judgments about the department. Its comic details do not erase the hospitalization or the loss of Finny’s brief happiness. Instead, the abrupt movement from hallway spectacle to medical confinement, then back to monotonous classroom exercises, gives the breakdown its force: a striking disruption is absorbed into the institution’s ordinary routines, while its memory persists beneath Finny’s later performance of respectability.