After reading · Part I · Chapter 3

Part I · Chapter 3Secrets in the Night

Summary

The narrator reflects that every person remains a profound secret to every other person, even to those closest to them. The three mail-coach passengers are therefore as separate in their inner lives as if miles divided them. Jerry rides back toward Tellson’s, repeatedly wondering what “Recalled to life” means.

Inside the jolting coach, Jarvis Lorry dozes. Familiar images of Tellson’s Bank mingle with a second imagined task: digging a white-haired, wasted man out of a grave. In repeated dream conversations, the buried figure says he has been buried almost eighteen years and cannot say whether he cares to live. At daylight Lorry wakes, looks at the rising sun, and marvels at the thought of someone buried alive for eighteen years.

Who’s who

• Jarvis Lorry — The bank passenger whose mission takes shape through uneasy dreams.
• Jerry — The messenger riding back while privately puzzling over Lorry’s reply.
• The buried man — A shifting, imagined figure in Lorry’s dreams, worn and prematurely white-haired.
• The other passengers — Lorry’s physically close but inwardly unknowable companions.