Arberg

Arberg is the dean who orders Jim Gardener out of a faculty gathering after Gardener turns an argument about nuclear power into a public denunciation. His brief confrontation with Gardener acquires a darker second meaning when, during Gardener’s later skiing hallucination, Arberg appears as a dead man and identifies the heart attack that followed the encounter as the cause of his death.

Identity and Introduction

Arberg appears in the context of a faculty gathering where Gardener is arguing about the dangers of nuclear power. Gardener’s insistence that the subject demands alarm rather than polite discussion culminates in a shout, and the dean’s wife recoils. Arberg watches Gardener with a cold, fixed expression, as though the outburst has permanently marked him in the dean’s judgment.

The gathering is already tense when Arberg tells Gardener to leave. Gardener ignores him and continues addressing a woman in the room, warning about nuclear waste and the risks associated with power plants. Arberg’s authority at the event is practical as well as institutional: he eventually takes hold of Gardener and announces to the assembled guests that he is throwing him out.

Confrontation with Gardener

The ejection turns into a physical struggle. As Arberg grabs him, Gardener’s glass falls and breaks. Several people applaud Arberg’s announcement, while the power-company representative’s wife, who had been distressed by Gardener’s behavior, presses against her husband. The reaction makes clear that Gardener’s denunciation has not been received simply as a courageous warning: to those present, his manner has become menacing and disruptive.

Gardener resists rather than submit to being removed. He drives an elbow backward into Arberg’s chest, and Arberg releases him. Gardener turns with his hands clenched, prepared to strike if Arberg touches him again, but the dean does not continue the fight. Instead, he clutches his chest and struggles to speak. The scene abruptly shifts from a contest over Gardener’s conduct to a medical emergency.

Death and Hallucinated Return

Much later, Gardener sees Arberg in a skiing hallucination. The imagined scene joins the earlier confrontation to Gardener’s own collapse and disorientation: Arberg appears beside him while he is skiing out of control, and his face is changed, visibly decaying. He tells Gardener that he is dead and that the earlier collapse was indeed a heart attack, not indigestion or a gallbladder problem. He further says that he died in the ambulance after the bar worker had briefly restarted his heart with CPR, and places his death at a stoplight on Storrow Drive.

This encounter is presented as part of Gardener’s altered, hallucinatory experience, not as an independently narrated scene of Arberg’s death. Its blunt confirmation gives the earlier episode a consequence that Gardener had not known at the time: the confrontation ended with Arberg’s fatal heart attack. The apparition also returns the memory in a form shaped by Gardener’s fear and guilt, making Arberg both the person who tried to remove him and the dead man whose final words expose the lasting cost of that night.

Narrative Significance

Arberg’s role is brief but consequential. At the gathering, he acts to stop Gardener’s increasingly disruptive conduct; Gardener’s resistance immediately precedes Arberg’s collapse. Later, the dead Arberg’s appearance turns that sequence into a haunting revelation within Gardener’s experience. The contrast between the dean’s public authority and his helplessness after the struggle sharpens the scene’s reversal: the man who had commanded Gardener to leave becomes an image Gardener cannot escape.

The episode also binds Gardener’s public arguments to his private damage. His concern about nuclear danger is not dismissed by the narrative, but the confrontation shows how his drinking and volatility compromise the way he delivers it and affect those around him. Arberg’s death, revealed through the hallucination, makes the cost of that loss of control concrete without resolving Gardener’s uncertainty about what the apparition means.