Disgrace: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

David and Melanie have sex one last time. It takes place in his daughter’s old bedroom, and as they get dressed afterwards, she asks him if he frequently sleeps with his students. In response, he uncomfortably insists that he doesn’t “collect women,” but she says, “Aren’t you collecting me?” Later that day, when he’s in his office, he receives a strange visitor. “So you are the professor,” the man says, sitting down with his leather jacket, leather pants, and “thin goatee.” When he tells David that Melanie has been talking about him, David asks what she has said, and the boy says, “That you fuck her.” As David tries to change the topic, the boy starts berating him, telling him that he can’t “just walk into people’s lives and walk out again.” He pushes the papers off David’s desk before storming out of the office.

That night, David waits up late for Melanie, but she doesn’t appear. The next morning, he discovers that his car has been vandalized, the paint scratched, the tires slashed, and the locks jammed with glue. In the coming days, he sees nothing of Melanie, and when he enters class, the students fall silent, a sure sign that they’ve heard something is going on. Worse, the boy who visited his office is sitting next to Melanie. Not knowing what to do, David goes forward as planned, lecturing about Lord Byron. Whenever he asks a question, though, nobody offers an answer—nobody, that is, except the young man, who eventually responds to David’s question about “what kind of creature” Lucifer is. “He does what he feels like. He doesn’t care if it’s good or bad. He just does it,” the boy says.

David ends class early and asks Melanie to accompany him to his office, where he closes the door before the young man can enter. “My dear,” he says, “you are going through a difficult time, I know that, and I don’t want to make it more difficult. But I must speak to you as a teacher. I have obligations to my students, all of them. What your friend does off campus is his own business. But I can’t have him disrupting my classes. Tell him that from me.” Going on, he tells her that she needs to focus more on her classwork and that she has to take the midterm exam she missed. In response, she tells him she can’t take the test because she hasn’t done the reading, so he says she can take it in his office the following Monday, which will give her time to study.