The Friend Quits Teaching

The Deceased Friend’s decision to quit teaching marks a break between a vocation he valued and a life he was trying to reshape. He liked teaching and needed the money, but left the job anyway. The Narrator and others knew those facts and, at first, did not treat his resignation as an alarm. Later, as they revisit the decision after his death, it becomes difficult to separate the practical loss of work and routine from the unresolved question of what the choice meant to him.

The Decision and Its Stated Conditions

The Deceased Friend had once said that his students would be what stopped him from taking his own life: he worried about the example his death might set for them. That recollection makes his resignation newly charged. The Narrator notes that people who knew he liked teaching and needed the income nevertheless thought little of his leaving the previous year. At the time, the decision could even be mistaken for a New Year’s resolution, its timing making it seem like an ordinary act of personal change rather than a sign that demanded closer attention.

In another conversation, the Deceased Friend had described suicide by a person who had reached a certain age as potentially rational, even a sound choice or solution. He contrasted that with a young person’s suicide, which he considered a mistake. These remarks do not establish that quitting teaching was a step toward suicide, and the account does not claim that it was. They do, however, give the resignation a troubling context: he had considered both the possible harm his death might do to students and the possibility that an older person might regard death as a reasoned choice. The distance between what he said and what others understood becomes part of the event’s significance.

Depression, Recovery, and the Return to Work

The Deceased Friend had a history of depression, and the six months before his recovery had been particularly severe. He could hardly get out of bed in the morning and wrote nothing. A back injury, caused while moving boxes, had kept him from exercising for weeks; even walking was painful. The Narrator recalls his governing equation, “If I can’t walk, I can’t write,” linking physical movement not just to exercise but to the possibility of writing.

By the summer, however, the crisis appeared to have lifted. His injury had healed, and he had resumed long walks and running in the park. After many false starts, he was absorbed in a new project; he sat at his desk each morning and often told others that the writing had gone well. He read extensively, as he usually did while working on a novel, and began socializing again with people he had avoided during his depression. He had also got a dog. These details make the timing of his resignation harder to interpret: it followed a period of disabling depression, but came as he was again writing, moving, reading, and reconnecting with people.

Teaching as Structure and Strain

In a later conversation, a woman close enough to ask about the Deceased Friend’s last years worries aloud over why he quit teaching and whether he seemed depressed. The Narrator says little at first. The woman believes leaving was a mistake, not only because teaching was something he loved, but because the work gave his life a structure that had been good for him. Her judgment places a concrete consequence beside the apparent freedom of quitting: the end of the job also meant the loss of a regular framework that she thought had helped sustain him.

Her view is not uncomplicated. She also knows that he had become less happy in the classroom and often complained that teaching was demoralizing, especially for a writer. When another person later asks why he left, the Narrator recounts those complaints as part of a broader disillusionment. The Deceased Friend thought students, including those from top schools, often could not distinguish a good sentence from a bad one; he believed people in publishing no longer cared how books were written. He spoke of books and literature as dying, and of the writer’s prestige as so diminished that authorship seemed to promise glory for no clear reason. The account presents these not as a single provable cause of his resignation, but as a sustained erosion of confidence in the work and the culture surrounding it.

A Question Left Open

The Deceased Friend’s loss of faith extended beyond teaching to fiction’s public purpose. As the Narrator explains it, he doubted that even a brilliantly written or intellectually rich novel could meaningfully affect society. The Narrator sets this skepticism against the famous story of Abraham Lincoln meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862 and recognizing her as the author of the book that had helped start a war, while also noting uncertainty about whether Lincoln actually said it. The allusion sharpens the contrast between a remembered era of literary influence and the Deceased Friend’s sense that such influence had become difficult to imagine.

The resignation therefore remains neither a simple escape from a disliked job nor a fully explained symptom of depression. He had reasons to be dissatisfied with teaching, and the surrounding culture seemed to him to have devalued both literature and writers. Yet the job had supplied structure, income, and a connection to students he had once named as a reason to stay alive. The narrative returns to the question of why he quit without converting those competing facts into a definitive motive. Its force lies in that gap: others can reconstruct his complaints and observe his recovery, but those signs do not disclose what the decision meant to him.