Tropic of Cancer: Pages 209-231 Summary & Analysis

Through a French-American exchange program, Henry has lined up a small-time job as an English professor in the city of Dijon. He’s not excited about the job at all, but he and Fillmore spend the Christmas holidays drinking and carousing with prostitutes as a sendoff. The morning of the day he is to leave, he and Fillmore decide to go to mass “for the fun of it.” As they wander hungover around a church, Henry finds himself surprisingly affected by the service, although he still thinks it to be meaningless. The sight of this seedy pair wandering the aisles attracts the attention of a suspicious priest, who promptly pushes them outside onto the steps. Fillmore and Henry instinctively laugh in his face, further enraging him, and then run away.

The incident reminds Henry of a time a few years earlier in Jacksonville, Florida, where he got caught when the stock market crashed. The town was suddenly overrun with financially ruined people like himself. He and his friend at the time, “Joe,” tried going to a synagogue to ask for aid, but the rabbi got angry when he learned they weren’t Jewish and kicked them out. A cop soon came along and beat them for loitering on a bench. They tried a Catholic priest for help and get the same results.

Henry takes the train to Dijon and feels he’s made a terrible mistake as soon as he arrives. The town is freezing and provincial. A hunchback shows him around the school and to his quarters, all of which Henry finds lackluster. He will work solely for room and board here, not salary. He finds almost nothing to like about the faculty or the food. He spends the dismal winter reluctantly going to the town’s mediocre cafes. His contempt for the academic establishment grows. He can teach whatever he wants in his class, so he goes for subjects like elephant mating, which attract lots of students.

Over the long winter, Henry starts to go stir-crazy in this dreary medieval town. He’s totally alienated from everyone around him, and his bleak surroundings take on an oppressive, Gothic quality. His nihilistic ramblings have a more purely depressive character than ever before. The only person he likes is the veilleur de nuit (night watchman), a “nobody” with whom he feels kinship. Every night at the end of dinner the man comes by the dining hall and drinks an entire bottle of wine in one gulp. Henry seems to see in him a Mediterranean vitality that has been suffocated under the northern chill of his surroundings. Henry lies awake through the nights, his mind reeling with a sense of meaninglessness. He thinks back on his past sexual partners, seeing them all as part of his futile desire not to be alone.