Previous
Divine Conflict
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in That Hideous Strength, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
In its quest to take over England, the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.) manipulates both its own members as well as the general population by blurring the truth and sowing doubt and confusion. The N.I.C.E.’s propaganda confuses everyday people, but deception is also a key component in the N.I.C.E.’s internal functions. Even high-ranking members like Dr. Filostrato are kept in the dark about matters concerning the organization’s mysterious Head, and the N.I.C.E. leadership keeps protagonist Mark Studdock confused and uncertain throughout his time in Belbury to ensure that he never feels confident leaving the N.I.C.E. Its members speak in acronyms and code words, and they talk in circles around their goals rather than addressing them straightforwardly. This constant obfuscation of the truth has taken a noticeable toll on the mind of Deputy Director Wither, who can barely distinguish between sleep and wakefulness, even as he leads the N.I.C.E. The confusion the N.I.C.E. leadership inflicts upon Mark as a low-level employee shapes him as he rises in the ranks, until he becomes complicit and eventually actively participates in deceiving people outside the N.I.C.E., which speaks to how disinformation spreads. The N.I.C.E. leaders employ Mark to write propaganda promoting the institution and muddying the truth about its operations. Mark does this so successfully that he later encounters townspeople convinced that the N.I.C.E. is acting in their best interests. Mark’s propaganda persuades the people of Edgestow to grant the N.I.C.E. “Emergency Regulation” powers, effectively putting Edgestow under martial law led by the N.I.C.E. The N.I.C.E. undermines the truth through propaganda and deliberate confusion, rendering people inside and outside the organization more vulnerable to deception. This strategy of the N.I.C.E.’s makes clear that intentionally sowing confusion is a tool by which authoritarian organizations deceive and manipulate people into serving them.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…
Deception and Confusion ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Deception and Confusion appears in each chapter of That Hideous Strength. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
chapter length:
Get the entire That Hideous Strength LitChart as a printable PDF.
Deception and Confusion Quotes in That Hideous Strength
Below you will find the important quotes in That Hideous Strength related to the theme of Deception and Confusion.
Chapter 1
Quotes
“How lovely it’s looking!” said Jane quite sincerely as she got out of the car. The Dimbles’ garden was famous.
“You’d better take a good look at it then,” said Dr. Dimble.
[…] “[P]oor dear, her husband is one of the villains of the piece. Anyway, I expect she knows.”
“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jane.
“Your own college is being so tiresome, dear. They’re turning us out. They won’t renew the lease.”
“Oh, Mrs. Dimble!” exclaimed Jane. “And I didn’t even know this was Bracton property.”
“There you are!” said Mrs. Dimble. “One half of the world doesn’t know how the other half lives. Here have I been imagining that you were using all your influence with Mr. Studdock to try to save us, whereas in reality––”
“Mark never talks to me about College business.”
“Good husbands never do,” said Dr. Dimble.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2
Quotes
It was a moment of extraordinary liberation for Mark. All sorts of things about Curry and Busby which he had not previously noticed, or else, noticing, had slurred over in his reverence for the Progressive Element, came back to his mind. He wondered how he could have been so blind to the funny side of them.
“It really is rather devastating,” said Feverstone […] “that the people one has to use for getting things done should talk such drivel the moment you ask them about the things themselves. […] our two poor friends, though they can be persuaded to take the right train, or even to drive it, haven’t a ghost of a notion where it’s going to, or why.”
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.
Chapter 5
Quotes
On what terms would he go back? Would he still be a member of the Inner Circle even at Bracton? […] He went out before lunch for one of those short, unsatisfactory walks which a man takes in a strange neighbourhood […]. After lunch he explored the grounds. But they were not the sort of grounds that anyone could walk in for pleasure. There were trees dotted about and winding paths covered so thickly with round white pebbles that you could hardly walk on them. […] There were plantations––slabs would be almost a better word––of that kind of laurel which looks as if it were made of cleverly painted and varnished metal. […] The whole effect was like that of a municipal cemetery. Yet, unattractive as it was, he sought it again after tea […].
Chapter 6
Quotes
She looked ahead: surely that bend in the road was more visible than it ought to be in such a fog? […] Certainly what had been grey was becoming white, almost dazzlingly white. A few yards farther and luminous blue was showing overhead, […] and then all of a sudden the enormous spaces of the sky had become visible and the pale golden sun, and […] she was standing on the shore of a little green sunlit island looking down on a sea of white fog […]. She took a deep breath. It was the size of this world above the fog which impressed her. Down in Edgestow all these days one had lived, even when out of doors, as if in a room, for only objects close at hand were visible. She felt she had come near to forgetting how big the sky is, how remote the horizon.
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.
