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The Werewolf
The boundary between light and darkness, or day and night, symbolizes the ambiguous, unknowable line between the social and natural categories that make up Van Cheele’s world. Van Cheele’s routines are precisely structured around the day, as he enjoys his morning cigarette and his afternoon walk, among other pleasures. At night, a civilized person is expected to be safely at home, leading to Van Cheele’s great surprise when Gabriel-Ernest tells him that he not only lives in the woods, but hunts in them at night, “on four feet.” Van Cheele assumes at first that Gabriel-Ernest is working with “some clever poacher dog,” showing how he associates nighttime with illicit activities like poaching.
While this assumption is incorrect, Van Cheele’s suspicions are not unfounded. He learns from Cunningham that at sunset Gabriel-Ernest becomes a werewolf, shedding his form as a wild, naked boy and instead assuming that of “a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.” Like the nighttime during which he hunts, the dark color of the wolf is inscrutable, further emphasizing the mysteriousness of his appearance. The fear that this transition into darkness inspires in Van Cheele is, ironically, made even stronger by the beauty of the sunsets immediately preceding it. When Cunningham sees Gabriel-Ernest, he is watching “the dying glow of the sunset,” and assumes that Gabriel-Ernest is doing the same. Likewise, Miss Van Cheele comments on the beauty of the sunset to Van Cheele, unaware that it signals not only the coming night, but Gabriel-Ernest’s transformation into the form of a wolf.
Light and Darkness Quotes in Gabriel-Ernest
The Gabriel-Ernest quotes below all refer to the symbol of Light and Darkness. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Gabriel-Ernest
Quotes
‘You can’t live in these woods,’ said Van Cheele.
‘They are very nice woods,’ said the boy, with a touch of patronage in his voice.
‘But where do you sleep at night?’
‘I don’t sleep at night; that’s my busiest time.’
Van Cheele began to have an irritated feeling that he was grappling with a problem that was eluding him.
‘What do you feed on?’ he asked.
‘Flesh,’ said the boy, and he pronounced the word with slow relish, as though he were tasting it.
‘Flesh! What flesh?’
‘Since it interests you, rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs in their season, children when I can get any; they’re usually too well locked in at night, when I do most of my hunting. It’s quite two months since I tasted child-flesh.’
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‘Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the landscape, leaving it cold and grey. And at the same moment an astounding thing happened – the boy vanished too!’
‘What! vanished away into nothing?’ asked Van Cheele excitedly.
‘No; that is the dreadful part of it,’ answered the artist; ‘on the open hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a large wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.’
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Get the entire Gabriel-Ernest LitChart as a printable PDF.
Light and Darkness Symbol Timeline in Gabriel-Ernest
The timeline below shows where the symbol Light and Darkness appears in Gabriel-Ernest. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Gabriel-Ernest
...boy tells him that he lives there, sleeping during the day and keeping busy at night. When Van Cheele asks him what he eats, the boy responds “Flesh,” that of wild...
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...images. At Van Cheele’s urging, however, he tells him what he saw. On his last night at Van Cheele’s, Cunningham was standing by the hedges watching the sunset, when he noticed...
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...feels that his only option is to reach home before dark. Reaching home just before sunset, he learns that his aunt has sent Gabriel-Ernest to take “the little Toop child home,”...
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Just before Van Cheele comes in sight of Gabriel-Ernest and the Toop child, the sun goes down and he hears “a shrill wail of fear.” There is no sign of either of...
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