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Pages 56-63
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tropic of Cancer, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Literature and Artistic Freedom
The United States vs. Europe
Friendship, Loneliness, and Art
Hunger, Sex, and the Human Condition
Summary
Analysis
Henry recalls how he had several Hindu friends back in America. Unexpectedly, one of these connections has turned out to serve him now, as he reconnects with an old acquaintance, Nanantatee (“Mr. Nonentity”), who has a suite of rooms in Paris and lets Henry stay there for free, in exchange for meticulously cleaning the place. Nanantatee had an arm mangled in an accident and needs help around the house. His money comes from a family trade in pearls. Henry becomes somewhat revolted at Nanantatee’s unconventional domestic rituals and at his own role as a kind of household slave to him. Nanantatee makes him pick up the crumbs that he and his pearl business partners drop on the floor, frequently reprimanding him for minor mistakes.
By this point in the narrative, there is no expectation left that any episode should follow from what preceded it. This disjointed procedure continues with the random introduction of an old Hindu friend, who provides both yet another target for Henry’s freeloading and a further entry in the novel’s catalogue of deformed and troubled souls. Henry’s domestic cleaning duties represent a new kind of indignity for him.
Themes
Nanantatee’s friend Kepi stops by the house every day. Kepi is like a cockroach; he scours the house for scraps of bread when Nanantatee is not looking. He presents himself as the ultimate in-the-know man in Paris, offering unsolicited advice on where to get better deals on anything that his interlocutor might possibly want, from merchandise to prostitutes. This shtick, however, is usually carried out with a view to finagling some change or “cheroot” (a type of tobacco) out of whoever he’s talking to.
Kepi’s active and obvious freeloading activities make him like a cockroach in Henry’s eyes, but the two ultimately resemble one another in their means of securing a living.
Themes
Henry finds Kepi fascinating because his only ambition is to have sex every night, despite having a wife and eight children back in Bombay. Kepi brings Henry a book to read about a suit between an Indian newspaper and a fraudulent holy man who was sexually profligate. Nanantatee compares the man to Krishna. Later, Nanantatee laments his own sexual inadequacy, partly connected to his mangled arm. As Henry gazes at the photos of Nanantatee’s family lining his walls, he enters into a poetic reverie about the ancient and mysterious qualities of the Indian people. Nanantatee himself, however, is a sadly reduced figure.
Henry’s fascination with India is of a piece with his negative view of the contemporary West. Henry would probably find little to criticize in the story of the sexually profligate holy man, as he clearly has no qualms about unfettered sexuality himself. The hypocrisy of the religious figure, however, foreshadows a string of episodes late in the novel when Henry finds both Christian and Jewish clergymen to be less charitable than their faiths would suggest.
Themes
Kepi’s client is in town, a disciple of Gandhi and ambassador for his movement, and Henry agrees to take him out on the town to find prostitutes. The young Hindu is extremely sexually eager, but he becomes nervous once actually in the brothel, and Henry has to switch girls with him to put him at ease. The young Hindu goes off to a room with the girl, but due to a miscommunication, he defecates in the bidet, enraging the madame of the house. Eventually, however, she calms down and tries to get more business out of him.
The young Hindu’s pursuit of his ravenous sexual appetite while officially on a diplomatic mission from Gandhi underscores the baseness and animality of everyone in the novel’s world. His unacceptable behavior in the brothel, however, serves to humanize the prostitutes by showing that there are things they won’t tolerate.
Themes
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Henry sees the young Hindu frequently over the next week, tagging along to his various political conferences and rendezvous. Henry reflects on the misguidedness of the Indian anticolonial movement, as they do not see that America, rather than England, is the true enemy: its bloodless modern efficiency is a “virus which is poisoning the whole world.”
The contact with a person from another culture prompts Henry to reflect on his own cultural background—as always, with disdain. Ironically, it also demonstrates his narrow-minded preoccupation with his own culture, since he assumes he knows what the anticolonial movement should prioritize better than they do.
Themes
On the young Hindu’s last night in Paris, Henry again agrees to take him to a brothel. The young Hindu quickly finds a girl and begins carousing with her. As Henry watches, he’s overcome with a penetrating sensation of metaphysical insight, akin to what epileptics are supposed to experience in the split second before a seizure. The “illusion of time and space” completely drop away from him. His insight seems to be that all values are relative and that the world is fundamentally grotesque, and that the universal urge to make things otherwise accounts for humankind’s unhappiness. Henry parts ways with the Hindu and walks home, brooding on this revelation. He feels that it has a cataclysmic, revolutionary significance and that he is personally liberated by it. He rejects morality and embraces his ferocious animal nature.
It is difficult to tell what exactly about this scene prompts Henry’s feeling of a major revelation. It is equally difficult to tell how anything he claims to realize here differs at all from what he already believed; he began the book by announcing that he had abandoned all illusions of morality and taste. Perhaps this scene mainly represents a deepening of that conviction, and a resolve to embrace the life lived according to these principles with more vigor and enjoyment.
Themes
