Fitzwilliam College

Fitzwilliam College is the Cambridge institution where Andrew Martin is a teaching fellow and professor, and where the Alien narrator goes looking for something of personal importance in Martin’s office. The college’s academic identity supplies one of the first concrete facts attached to the narrator’s new human life; later, its buildings become the setting for a discreet search conducted under Martin’s name.

Identity and setting

As the narrator moves toward Cambridge, information about the life he has taken over arrives alongside the name Professor Andrew Martin. He learns that Martin is married, has a son, and has recently solved a major mathematical problem. Fitzwilliam College is part of this newly received identity: the narrator’s connection to it is not initially grounded in personal memory, but in facts transmitted to him. The institution therefore marks the difference between knowing a role and knowing how to live it.

The college is also where the narrator’s unfamiliarity with ordinary human expectations becomes visible. An officer identifies him as a teaching fellow at Fitzwilliam College while questioning why he had been walking naked in the grounds of Corpus Christi College. The exchange establishes a distinction between the place of his employment and the separate college grounds where the incident occurred. Fitzwilliam is presented through an official record, but that record cannot explain his conduct: the title is legible to the authorities even when the person occupying it is not.

The Sunday visit

Later, on a Sunday evening, the narrator rides Andrew Martin’s bicycle to Fitzwilliam College. He understands that the college is likely to be quiet, but his unfamiliarity with road rules makes the journey uncertain; he narrowly avoids accidents before reaching the college. The approach leads along Storey’s Way, described as a long, quiet, tree-lined street. These details give the visit a careful, subdued pace, while the narrator’s difficulty navigating the journey keeps the scene anchored in his incomplete adjustment to human life.

At the college, he leans the bicycle against a wall and approaches the main entrance of the largest of its three buildings. The building is relatively modern, wide, and three storeys high. Inside, he passes a woman cleaning the wooden floor with a bucket and mop. She appears to recognise him, but not with pleasure. The brief encounter makes the place more than a neutral architectural setting: the narrator is entering a workplace where other people have histories and expectations associated with the man he is impersonating, even though he cannot yet read those expectations reliably.

Martin’s office

The narrator presents himself to the cleaner as Professor Andrew Martin and explains that an accident has caused short-term memory loss. He says he is off work for a while but needs something of personal value from his office, then asks whether she can direct him there. His account is an attempt to make his presence seem ordinary without revealing his actual identity or purpose. The explanation also exposes a practical problem: he has inherited Martin’s position and access to the college, but not the personal knowledge that would make those credentials feel natural.

After the woman leaves, the narrator uses a key to enter the office, taking care not to do anything conspicuous in case anyone sees him. He finds himself in Martin’s workplace, which is at once his under the assumed identity and unfamiliar to him. The office’s ordinariness unsettles any expectation that it will immediately explain what to do: the narrator has no reference points for its contents or arrangement. Fitzwilliam thus frames the gap between possession and understanding. He can reach the office and unlock its door, yet the space remains new to him, just as the academic identity attached to the college remains a role he has learned through transmitted facts rather than lived experience.

Narrative significance

Fitzwilliam College links the story’s mathematical premise to the narrator’s gradual encounter with everyday human life. It is the institution connected to Martin’s professorship and work, but the scenes there focus less on academic achievement than on the habits and social meanings the narrator cannot yet take for granted: navigating a bicycle, being recognised by a colleague, explaining an absence, and entering a familiar person’s office without knowing what to expect. The college’s quiet Sunday setting allows these small tests of impersonation and adaptation to carry the scene.

The visit also turns the office into a point of tension between access and knowledge. The narrator possesses a key and can pass through the college’s physical thresholds, but neither fact gives him the human reference points he lacks. Fitzwilliam is therefore both a real workplace in Martin’s life and a measure of how much remains strange to the person occupying his place.