Fifth Business: Part 6 Summary & Analysis

Dunstan’s encounter with Liesl—in which he learns to take together the rational and irrational, angelic and devilish, marvelous and degraded—seems to help him achieve a kind of breakthrough in his writing. He writes a text that appeals to readers’ humanity. Dunstan seems as though he is in some ways a new man—he shows his affection for Faustina, he finds a solution to the problem of Mary’s hospital bills, and most of all seems to find a real kind of faith and happiness.

It is, unfortunately, short-lived. Dunstan makes the well-intentioned mistake of telling Mary about her son, and she is not mentally or emotionally equipped to deal with the information. Dunstan is once again thrown out of Mrs. Dempster’s life—just as he was in Deptford. History repeats itself.

Dunstan is prevented form seeing Mary, and on top of that, his only other “friend” has married a woman who does not approve of Dunstan. Perhaps we could see this as fate uprooting Dunstan’s old roots. He has been reborn, after all, and it seems life has changes in store for him. Boy has finally found a woman who measures up to him, and should not need to vent to Dunstan anymore.

Denyse is like a perfect combination of young businessman and loving woman. She satisfies Boy’s need for femininity as well as his “Corporate Homosexuality.”

It is revealed that Denyse dislikes Dunstan because she finds his interest in faith, religion, and sainthood to be silly and frivolous. Boy calls this “rationalism.” However, Dunstan sees Denyse and Boy’s newfound atheism to be precisely the opposite: it is “psychological suicide”—by which he seems to mean the willful prioritization of empty “successes” such as Boy’s beyond the pursuit or believe in the miraculous—and suicide is perhaps the most irrational act one could commit.

Boy finally admits that his life, though flashy, glamorous, and successful, has not been fulfilling. Dunstan tries to help him by giving him advice about the place of myth and self-realization in a happy life, but Boy rejects this help, calling Dunstan a lunatic. Dunstan could have helped Boy with his spiritual success just as Boy helped Dunstan with his finances, but Boy is unwilling to receive such help.

Mrs. Dempster dies, and Dunstan blames himself even for this final (and inevitable) tragedy. That Mrs. Dempster doesn’t remember any of the events with Dunstan, while for Dunstan they were the central defining aspects of his life. This is Dunstan’s personal “religion.” Mrs. Dempster may be a saint for him, but he isn’t anything to her.

Dunstan has not cried since he was a boy and his mother showed him that people are often not what they seem. He still feels guilty, but he is expressing his emotions, he is acting like a feeling, caring human being—this was Liesl’s wish for him, and it appears to be coming true.

Dunstan, who we have seen typically likes to deny his want for and appreciation of flattery, goes to Europe admittedly to seek out praise from the Bollandists. This impulse—in addition to being psychologically self-aware and human—also gives him the opportunity to see Padre Blazon again.

Padre Blazon is a true friend and clearly cares about Dunstan. He uses the phrase “fool saint” just as Father Regan did—but, as is typical with him, the religion of others has no effect on his personal religions: certain definitions, Padre Blazon believes, should be left up to the individual.

Padre Blazon tells us what we perhaps already knew—that Mary Dempster, though her sainthood could never be peddled as a widely agreed-upon fact, was a saint for Dunstan. We could say her sainthood is, to use Dunstan’s phrase, “a psychological reality.” And Padre Blazon’s point is that this is enough, to have a personal saint who illuminated just your own life. Public recognition of that saint is unnecessary.

Liesl is then incorporated into Dunstan’s personal mythology. She is his “devil”—and Padre Blazon’s (unusual but heartening) opinion is that a relationship with the devil, so long as it does not involve personal compromise or a “Faustian” bargain (Faustina’s name is called to mind) is a beneficial thing, that one must come to terms with one’s devils rather than avoid or repress them.

That Dunstan does not feel he needs to take a photograph of the statue shows that Dunstan is content to accept his own lived reality as “truth”—he doesn’t need photographic—public—proof. The Madonna is “his forever.”

Suddenly we learn that Boy dies under mysterious circumstances. Denyse, though she dislikes Dunstan, still asks him to do her the considerable favor of writing Boy’s official life. She is essentially asking him to consider being a spectator of Boy’s life even after his death. Dunstan has been a spectator his whole life, so perhaps she assumes he will accept this job as he has accepted so many others.

We learn that Dunstan will have a life-altering event just after Boy’s funeral—an event that will teach him not to accept jobs he doesn’t want, and also will teach him about the nature of truth and history.

Finally this trio is reunited, even as the novel has ratcheted up the stakes by revealing that both Boy’s death and Dunstan’s heart attack occur just after this encounter. Boy clearly does not recognize Paul, and ill advisedly tries to win Paul over by teasing Dunstan, by making himself look superior. Boy still traffics in appearances above all. What’s more, Boy, who has little appreciation for everything magical, spiritual, or religious, wants immediately to know how Eisengrim pulled off the Brazen head illusion – Boy cares about the “facts” rather than the “lived reality.” Eisengrim will reveal no such secrets to Boy, whom we can assume he recognizes, based on his clear memory of Boy sitting in his audience.

Paul reveals his whole backstory to Boy, wasting no time in explaining away certain misconceptions about his childhood—his life has been difficult, and his current success is certainly not the result of a charmed childhood. Paul’s abuse at the hands of his mentor recall Dunstan’s idea of Boy’s attraction to his own mentees.

Boy harassed Paul as a child—no doubt Paul has carried these cruel words with him for much of his life. Boy, meanwhile, has either repressed the memory of Paul’s entire family completely. This scene illustrates the effect that psychological phenomena like trauma and repression can have on a person’s sense of historical events. It also makes it clear that of the three people involved in the snowball accident and the events after, only Dunstan had any memory of it. Both Mrs. Dempster and Boy do not. The lived experience of these three characters have been entirely different.

Dunstan has always thought himself to be an excellent keeper of secrets (at least until he spilled his life story to Liesl. This conception of himself has in many ways framed the way he conceives of his own childhood—a secretive affair where he kept to himself and shared nothing unnecessary with anyone. But Paul breaks down Dunstan’s personal history with his own, emphasizing yet again that history cannot be separated from psychology.

Now it’s Paul’s turn to discover his memory does not necessarily contain a completely factual account of his own life. He remembers the Ramsays as being a cruel and hardened family, when in fact Mrs. Ramsay cared more about the well-being of the Dempsters (prior to Mary’s indiscretion) than anyone else in Deptford. When the ashes are revealed, it becomes clear that Dunstan’s secret will finally get out.

Dunstan finally admits to his role in Paul’s premature birth and Mary Dempster’s mental impairment. He has carried this guilt with him his entire life, and finally admits it in front of two people directly involved in the accident. Boy, on the other hand, seems incapable of guilt. He can simply forget his wrongdoings or dismiss them as insignificant. Even when presented with physical evidence (the stone that Dunstan has kept all these years) he cannot feel any sense of responsibility.

Boy’s belief that all this stems from Dunstan’s jealousy over Leola again emphasizes Boy’s focus on the importance of “having” things, of competing, though it also highlights the profound difference between his and Dunstan’s lived experience. The missing paperweight is reminiscent of the money Paul stole from Dunstan, and suggests now that Paul stole that money as revenge for what he remembered as the Ramsay’s cruelty, just as he steals the stone now to cap off another, more complete, revenge.

Liesl answer suggests that Boy was killed by himself (he had already in Dunstan’s words committed “psychological suicide”). “The woman he knew” and “the woman he did not know” likely refer to the two versions of Mrs. Dempster—the one he knew as a child, and the version of her he forgot about or neglected to notice. Paul granted Boy’s “inmost wish” by killing him (since he desired to die) and “the inevitable fifth” is Dunstan, whose inevitable (read: fated) role in the story was crucial to the story’s conclusions.

Finally we learn of Dunstan’s fate—the reader can assume that after composing this letter to the headmaster, Dunstan goes to live out his days with Liesl and Eisengrim, finding his spirituality and humanity to be best served by this odd group, living among faith and magic, creating and sharing lived experience, learning from their devils.