Because of its ambiguity, “The Tower” is a story that relies heavily on implication and the reader’s intuition. The details of the tower’s history are critical but sparse, and they’re not entirely reliable. Neville infers that the tower’s builder—Niccolo di Ferramano—dabbled in the occult, leading his family to disown him. Niccolo’s young wife, Giovanna, died in the same year the village that once surrounded the tower was completely destroyed. Apart from these tantalizing details, the tower’s actual backstory is never explicitly revealed, leaving the reader to formulate their own hypothesis about what dark things might have happened there. In this way, the story keeps the reader on the same footing as its protagonist, Caroline, who knows all the same information when she goes to visit the tower.
Caroline’s own intuition makes an appearance just before she enters the tower as “an urgent voice inside her” that tells her to return to Florence. Like the reader, Caroline has surmised based on the scant known details that the tower’s history is unsavory and that it might even be dangerous. Caroline disregards this intuitive form of self-protection and enters the tower despite herself. The next time such a voice makes itself known, its aim seems to have shifted from protecting Caroline to convincing her to throw herself from the tower’s peak—perhaps suggesting that it can be dangerous to rely on intuitive forms of self-preservation.
One interpretation reads this shift as the voice of the tower intruding on Caroline’s thoughts to manipulate her into becoming a willing sacrifice. Another way of reading this takes the story’s ending into account, when Caroline seems to perpetually descend the tower stairs. Knowing this, it is possible to read the voice as Caroline’s intuition attempting to save her from whatever unseen horror awaits at the bottom of the stairs (if, that is, she ever finds the bottom). In this reading, her intuition would effectively suggest that death is better than whatever her fate is now that she has entered the tower. The story intentionally leaves the question of who controls the voice—the tower or Caroline—ambiguous, emphasizing the horror of being unable to trust one’s own mind.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Intuition and Self-Preservation ThemeTracker
Intuition and Self-Preservation Quotes in The Tower
Triumphantly Caroline lifted her finger from the fine italic type. There was nothing to mar the success of this afternoon. Not only had she taken the car out alone for the first time, driving unerringly on the right-hand side of the road, but what she had achieved was not a simple drive but a cultural excursion. […] how gratifying if she could, at last, have something of her own to contribute to [Neville’s] constantly accumulating hoard of culture.
Caroline shivered, ‘I don’t like him,’ she said. ‘Let’s look at Giovanna again,’ and they had moved back to the first portrait, and Neville had said casually, ‘Do you know, she’s rather like you.’
Caroline knew that she wanted to take the fork to the left, to Florence and home and Neville and—said an urgent voice inside her—for safety.
‘It would be so silly to give up,’ she told herself, desperately trying to rationalize what drove her on. ‘Just because one’s afraid—’ and then she had to stifle that thought too, and there was nothing left in her brain but the steadily mounting tally of steps.
All her being was suddenly absorbed in the single impulse to hurl herself from the sloping platform. ‘I cannot go down any other way,’ she said, and then she heard what she said and stepped back, frenziedly clutching the soft rotten wood of the doorway with hands sodden with sweat. There is no other way, said the voice in her brain, there is no other way.
She could not move. It was not possible that she should dare to go down, step by step down the unprotected stairs into the dark below. It would be much easier to fall, said the voice in her head, to take one step to the left and fall and it would all be over. You cannot climb down.
