I was just looking back through the earlier sections of the book, and the following passage, where Nick asks his wife about Brian and then wishes he had done it earlier: " 'What do I detect?' 'What do you mean?' she said. 'Between you and Brian.' 'What do you mean?' she said. 'What do I detect? That's what I mean.' He makes me laugh,' she said finally ... I hear the shower rnning accross the hall and I realized I'd done it all wrong. I should have rbought up the subject standing in the doorway while she was watching TV. Then I could have been the one who walks out of the room" (117). There is something strikingly filmic about both the exchange itself and Nick's curious reaction. In film, if a character realizes that his or her partner is having an affair - or at least something sketchy is going on - many times the scene will end with them walking away in confusion, in pain, in disgust, really whatever emotion we want to confer to the character. The important point is that there is a sense of redemption in this gesture of abandonment, as if the one who leaves somehow "wins" the exchange - so maybe you're cheating on me, but I get to walk out of the room on you! The emotional turmoil, the banal headache of having sort out who gets to keep all the various property (in case of divorce), the toll it takes on the children: all this gets completely eclipsed in filmic formula by the redemptive moment when the one character walks out of the room. In my experience at least, this isn't really how things work. This notion of redemption is the less glamorous sibling of the trope where we see the couple twenty years later still just as much in love with each other as day one. How were those twenty years filled? We don't get to see the fights, the sterile routinization of sex, the frustration that doesn't wrap in some sort of nice, quick, dialectical fix, but keeps playing itself out pathologically, over and over again. In the context of the novel, my question here was: why does Nick think, "I should have been the one to walk out of the room," instead of "What should I have done / be doing to make this marriage work?" I think Nick's emphasis on the former says something about the ideology that has shaped his persona. Bourgeios thinking holds the promise of moments of transcendence/redemption that make the daily grind "worth it." You may hate your wage-slave job, but you work all week so you can enjoy your weekend as a consumer. The book might not be that enjoyable on the whole, but boy that ending really brought things together (all the novels we're reading are somewhat of the opposite). The product may suck, but it won't result in much waste. My marriage my be a mess, but I walked out on my partner during a fight and not vice versa, so it's okay. The problem I have with this kind of thinking is that it deprecates daily lived experience. To privilege one moment, or just a condensed collection of moments, has serious consequences. A common element of morality play-esque film and literature is having two characters who have been in love for the entirity of the work finally come together at the end. Maybe they never admitted their love for one another, or maybe there was some barrier to their co-presence. Anyway, the point is: this kind of ending is supposed to be poignantly redemptive - God I was lost there for a long time but now we're together so it makes it all worth it. No. That's like copulating just to get to the climactic moment: sad, desperate, and alienating. Consider later in the novel when Brian is talking to Marvin about the ball. Marvin says: "You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed" (170). As if to die as such, to become good waste, as Nick might say, redeems a poorly lived life. Long story short, throw out teleology. Start the revolution now. Etc.