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The Head
John Wither is the Deputy Director of the N.I.C.E. and the institution’s second-in-command behind the Head. He and Professor Frost are the only members of the N.I.C.E. who understand the Head’s demonic power, and when the N.I.C.E. is destroyed, Wither understands the significance of that destruction more than anyone else. The name “Wither” indicates how years in the N.I.C.E. have withered the old man’s mind. He speaks in long, confusing monologues that never answer the question he’s been asked, and, because he rarely sleeps, he moves around the N.I.C.E. in a state between awake and asleep. Mark notes that Wither seems to always be present everywhere in the N.I.C.E. Wither sacrifices Reverend Straik and Dr. Filostrato to the Head as the N.I.C.E. is destroyed at the end of the book, but the Head does not protect him when Mr. Bultitude finds and kills him.
John Wither Quotes in That Hideous Strength
The That Hideous Strength quotes below are all either spoken by John Wither or refer to John Wither. 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:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
Mark did not ask again in so many words what the N.I.C.E. wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room––a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16
Quotes
Therefore [Wither] knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. […] He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of Dr. Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of Hell is, perhaps, stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic.
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John Wither Quotes in That Hideous Strength
The That Hideous Strength quotes below are all either spoken by John Wither or refer to John Wither. 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:
).
Chapter 3
Quotes
Mark did not ask again in so many words what the N.I.C.E. wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room––a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 16
Quotes
Therefore [Wither] knew that everything was lost. It is incredible how little this knowledge moved him. It could not, because he had long ceased to believe in knowledge itself. What had been in his far-off youth a merely aesthetic repugnance to realities that were crude or vulgar, had deepened and darkened, year after year, into a fixed refusal of everything that was in any degree other than himself. […] He had willed with his whole heart that there should be no reality and no truth, and now even the imminence of his own ruin could not wake him. The last scene of Dr. Faustus where the man raves and implores on the edge of Hell is, perhaps, stage fire. The last moments before damnation are not often so dramatic.
