If you haven't read RAIN, this has spoilers in it.

If you have read RAIN, this has discussion in it.

I've spent a considerable part of the last 24 hours thinking about what to write next and trying to research Somerset Maugham's Rain. Specifically, I'm trying to understand how the reader and point-of-view character come to the same realization at the same final instant--and how it's achieved with nothing more than the words "He understood."

Obviously if "He understood" sparks the same understanding in me, the story--the entire thing, minus that last line--is constructed with the intent of bringing me to the brink of this understanding. To allude to one of the only things that stuck with me from my reading of Goedel, Escher, Bach twenty years ago (yeah, the whole thing; cut me some slack--I had pneumonia), I've been shown a near-complete letter A. I recognize that it's an A, but it's missing part of one stroke. So I add the stroke.

I add the stroke. Not the person who drew the rest of the letter. I do it. He supplies the unfinished shape; I supply the closure.

He leaves it on a suspended chord. I resolve it. I add the moment of understanding. Maugham doesn't do it. He set it up so I'd do it.

How'd he do that?

So I googled all kinds of things. maugham rain structure, maugham rain ending, short story ending build... I found reviews of trans-gender versions of the play, lots of droning about colonialism, a few people who missed the point entirely--but my sixth-grader's overdeveloped sense of outrage didn't spark until I hit this.

The "this" I'm referring to starts lower left, and includes:

I even find it hard to understand why Davidson conceives a sudden and irresistible lust for Sadie Thompson, who is not only offensively coarse in his eyes, but also described as having become frumpish and slovenly. General reasons can be offered: the attraction of opposites; the desire to debase oneself; the revenge of repressed sexual desire; the proximity of spiritual to sexual love, and so on. But the story supplies specific grounds for none of these.

Yes it does, by supplying a character for whom those are obvious potential motivations.

The character is an inflexible, obsessive Calvinist missionary fixated on sexual immorality. How can any perceptive reader fail to suspect the very motivations this critic tries to pretend aren't supplied? Can he only understand them if they're stated explicitly?

Isn't closure one of the primary pleasures of reading?



I find it hard to understand why we conclude this is a photo of a forest. General reasons can be offered: the presence of redwoods; the presence of eucalyptus; the presence of maple trees; the presence of ash trees...