“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds” is the Emerson line The unnamed narrator remembers underlining during his years at Occidental. Its significance lies in the double application he finds for it: the phrase describes what he sees as American inconsistency, but also the contradictions of his motherland, where he says inconsistency is defining.

Source and Setting

The unnamed narrator recalls reading Emerson on a lawn at Occidental, during six years of study in California in the 1960s. The setting gathers two strands of his assigned life in America: his attention moves between the words on the page and the young women sunning themselves nearby, while his education serves a covert purpose. Man, his fellow conspirator, had sent him to learn American ways of thinking; the narrator describes that work as a psychological war.

The sentence becomes memorable within this divided education. The narrator reads American history and literature, refines his grammar, absorbs slang, and earns bachelor’s and master’s degrees. Emerson’s line is not just a literary discovery in that account: it gives him language for reflecting on the society he has been studying from both within and outside it.

Recollection and Meaning

The narrator says he underlined the words once, twice, thrice. He associates the act with the sharp contrast between the dark print on a bare white page and the sunlit scene around him, but the phrase’s force comes from its portability: what he takes to be true of America, he also recognizes in his motherland. His conclusion refuses a simple contrast between a consistent home and an inconsistent foreign country. The same judgment reaches both places.

The phrase also sits beside another remembered toast whose source and meaning the narrator cannot recall, though he acquired it during his years in America. That gap in memory frames the Emerson line as a more durable inheritance: he remembers where he encountered it, how insistently he marked it, and what it came to mean, even as he admits that the sentence applies beyond the country whose thought he was sent to study.

Political and Narrative Function

The surrounding account sharpens the irony through a contrast between The General and the narrator. The General had trained at Fort Benning in 1958, where the Green Berets permanently turned him against communism; the narrator says that this political inoculation did not take in his own case. Against that difference, Emerson’s observation about consistency becomes a way to register the uneven results of their American experiences without claiming that either man’s response represents a simple national rule.

The line is recalled retrospectively, as the narrator looks back on his college education from a later point in the story. Its movement from a sunlit campus to a judgment about two countries makes the phrase a compact expression of his divided perspective: he has studied American thought as an operative, but he does not treat the contradictions he finds there as uniquely American.