George Glenn’s funeral is Othello’s first encounter with a human burial, and its significance lies in the contrast between public ceremony and private recognition. While the mourners gather and God speaks, Othello identifies George in the coffin by scent and remains the one mourner who thinks about the man himself. The service also releases a memory of George saving Othello and promising a journey to Europe that never came to pass, ending in Othello’s insistence on justice.

Approach to the Burial Ground

Othello reaches the funeral by following a high drystone wall through the mist. Voices murmur beyond it, unusually hushed and excited; he slips through a small wrought-iron gate, working its latch with a front hoof, and shuts it behind him with his head. His remembered experience in the circus has made such an entrance possible, a practical skill that allows him to cross into a human gathering unnoticed.

At first, the place resembles a carefully arranged vegetable garden: straight paths, square beds, freshly turned earth, and human figures moving toward one point. But the smell overturns that impression. The vegetation seems unnatural and unappetizing, and an old smell of death drifts along the gravel. Othello remembers Sam, a foolish man who had been put in charge of a pit behind the zoo’s elephant house. The animals knew the pit’s reputation: when Sam returned, even the goats left him alone and the carrion eaters watched him. He smelled of ancient death. That association lets Othello recognize the burial ground not by its layout but by what the earth holds.

The Funeral and Its Mourners

This is Othello’s first funeral, but he behaves with composed attention. Black and serious among the gravestones, he listens to the music and occasionally munches a pansy. When the brown coffin is brought forward, he knows by its scent who is inside. His recognition precedes any human announcement and gives the scene a private certainty amid the formal ritual.

Othello has already scented God swaying solemnly in the mist. During the service, God speaks about himself, while Kate cries. The ceremony is present, but George seems absent from the mourners’ thoughts: Othello concludes that nobody is thinking about the man in the coffin except him. The contrast is pointed rather than explained. The people have gathered around George’s burial, yet Othello’s sensory knowledge and remembered bond make him the only one who appears to attend to George as an individual.

Othello’s Memory of George

The coffin brings Othello back to the first time he saw George. The memory begins in cigarette smoke, with blood running into Othello’s eyes and his legs trembling from exhaustion. A dead dog lies beside him, but death has become ordinary in the world he knows: another dog will come. Othello struggles to keep his eyes open. When they close, he experiences a brief blackness and hears a voice warn that closed eyes mean death. He has no objection to being dead, yet obeys and opens them.

George’s green eyes hold his attention until Othello’s legs stop shaking. Othello then turns toward the door through which the dogs have been coming and lowers his horns. The memory binds George’s arrival to Othello’s survival: George’s interest gives the exhausted ram something to hold on to, and Othello’s next gesture is not surrender but readiness to face the dogs. A little later, still bleeding, he lies in the back seat of George’s stationary old car while night presses against its windows. George, triumphant, announces, “We’re going to Europe.”

The Unfulfilled Promise

The funeral returns the memory to its unresolved ending. George had been wrong; he and Othello never went to Europe. The promise had offered a destination beyond the circumstances in which George found him, but the funeral makes its nonfulfilment unavoidable. Othello’s repeated thought of justice is therefore attached both to George’s death and to the journey that never took place. The passage does not explain what justice would require. Instead, it closes on Othello’s insistence, leaving the word suspended between the dead man’s fate, the forgotten rescue, and a promise that the funeral cannot redeem.