The Beast in the Jungle

by

Henry James

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Fate and Failure Theme Icon
Understanding and Connection Theme Icon
Love and Loss Theme Icon
Courage vs. Cowardice Theme Icon
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Fate and Failure Theme Icon

In The Beast in the Jungle, protagonist John Marcher believes he’s destined for a mysterious fate that will alter his life—though he isn’t sure exactly what will happen, or if this fate will be positive or negative. While he keeps his belief in his fate a secret, he later remembers that, years earlier, he told a woman named May Bartram about it. After Marcher reconnects with May at a luncheon, the two of them spend years waiting for his fate together—but as the years go on without incident, Marcher begins to worry that there is no “beast” at all. If there is no fate awaiting him, he believes it would mean that he’d failed, since he centered his life around a fate that wasn’t coming. But May eventually dies, and Marcher realizes that he did have a fate: to live a life without passion or love—May loved Marcher, but Marcher didn’t let himself grow close to anyone because of his belief in the “beast.” With this tragic realization, the novella suggests that it’s better to live a quiet, happy, and fulfilled life than to waste time anticipating some great fate. The only real failure is an unlived life.

In the beginning of the novella, Marcher believes that something incredibly important is fated to happen to him, so he allows anticipation to rule his life. Most notably, Marcher’s anticipation of his fate makes him emotionally detached from other people. Although he has a social life and a government job, he goes through life mimicking acceptable human behavior instead of being himself or feeling his emotions, all in an effort to keep his fate a secret from others. While Marcher doesn’t think his fate will be a great achievement, he still believes that having a rare fate makes him unique, and he derides the “stupid[ity]” of others around him. Because Marcher secretly feels that others are inferior to him, he takes extra care to have good manners and act politely in society. His belief in his fate therefore limits his ability to connect with others and ensures that he’s always putting on a false image in public. Eventually, Marcher is able to connect with May, since he told her his secret in Naples 10 years ago (an encounter he later forgot). However, because he believes that his fate is meant for him alone, he dismisses the possibility of marrying May, even though he enjoys her company and feels that she alone can understand him. Because Marcher doesn’t want to involve a woman in his fate—both because a woman could get hurt and because his fate is meant to be a solitary adventure—Marcher avoids taking the logical next step in his relationship with May and marrying her, all because he believes that the “beast” is waiting in the wings.

Years later, after Marcher learns that May will soon die of a blood disorder, he worries that there’s no great fate for her to witness after all—and that as a result, Marcher’s life is a failure. Marcher would actually prefer an awful fate to no fate at all: he would be fine with going bankrupt or even being hanged, because at least these fates would mean that he didn’t waste his life believing in a “beast” that doesn’t exist. In fact, Marcher wants a fate that’s proportional to the years he spent anticipating it—so a truly gruesome fate would seem fitting. For Marcher, a simple, quiet life without a huge catastrophe would be a failure. Worse, Marcher worries that if there is no “beast,” May will have been waiting for his fate with him for no reason. May has devoted most of her time to discussing Marcher’s fate and dealing with society’s comments about her odd relationship with Marcher, since the two of them are unmarried and yet spend most of their time together. Marcher worries that their relationship won’t have meant anything if there’s no huge event for May to witness before her death. In other words, he worries that his life will be a failure both because there might not be a “beast” and because his and May’s relationship (which centered around the “beast”) may not have meant anything.

But at the end of the novella, Marcher realizes that waiting for his fate was his fate. If he failed in life, he failed not because there was no beast, but because he allowed the beast to prevent him from living his life to the fullest. Before May died, she told Marcher that she knew what his fate was and that his fate had already occurred. Later, Marcher realizes that she was referring to the fact that nothing had ever happened or would ever happen to him. He spent his whole life waiting for his “doom,” but his doom ended up being the act of anticipation itself, since that anticipation kept him from connecting with others or doing anything memorable.  Marcher’s anticipation of his fate also prevented him from deepening his connection with May. When Marcher thought there was no beast, he worried that May never benefitted from their relationship. But after May dies, Marcher realizes that the reason she never benefitted is that he never chose to love her—he was too focused on himself. He also realizes that she loved him and tried to save him from his fate by hinting at her romantic feelings. The “beast” emerged when he failed to grasp her hints, which would have led to a loving relationship. Marcher spent his life anticipating a great fate and then worrying that he’d be a failure if there was no fate. In this way, Marcher’s fixation on his fate ultimately becomes his fate. Marcher believed that having no fate would mean that he failed in life, but his only failure was his inability to live a happy, fulfilled life with May.

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Fate and Failure Quotes in The Beast in the Jungle

Below you will find the important quotes in The Beast in the Jungle related to the theme of Fate and Failure.
Chapter 1 Quotes

There came in fact a moment when Marcher felt a positive pang. It was vain to pretend she was an old friend, for all the communities were wanting, in spite of which it was as an old friend that he saw she would have suited him. He had new ones enough—was surrounded with them for instance on the stage of the other house; as a new one he probably wouldn’t have so much as noticed her. He would have liked to invent something, get her to make-believe with him that some passage of a romantic or critical kind had originally occurred. He was really almost reaching out in imagination—as against time—for something that would do, and saying to himself that if it didn’t come this sketch of a fresh start would show for quite awkwardly bungled. They would separate, and now for no second or no third chance. They would have tried and not succeeded.

Related Characters: John Marcher, May Bartram
Page Number: 36-37
Explanation and Analysis:

“Well, say to wait for—to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves.”

She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. “Isn’t what you describe perhaps but the expectation—or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people—of falling in love?”

[…]

“The only thing is,” he went on, “that I think if it had been that I should by this time know.”

“Do you mean because you’ve been in love?” And then as he but looked at her in silence: “You’ve been in love, and it hasn’t meant such a cataclysm, hasn’t proved the great affair?”

“Here I am, you see. It hasn’t been overwhelming.”

“Then it hasn’t been love,” said May Bartram.

Related Characters: John Marcher (speaker), May Bartram (speaker)
Related Literary Devices:
Page Number: 39-40
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

The real form it should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn’t a privilege he could invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years, like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn’t cause himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt.

Related Characters: John Marcher, May Bartram
Related Symbols: The Beast
Page Number: 43-44
Explanation and Analysis:

Oh he understood what she meant! “For the thing to happen that never does happen? For the Beast to jump out? No, I’m just where I was about it. It isn’t a matter as to which I can choose, I can decide for a change. It isn’t one as to which there can be a change. It’s in the lap of the gods. One’s in the hands of one’s law—there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it will operate, that’s its own affair.”

Related Characters: John Marcher (speaker), May Bartram
Related Symbols: The Beast
Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:

“What I see, as I make it out, is that you’ve achieved something almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely you’ve lost your sense of it; you know it’s there, but you’re indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger is,” May Bartram wound up, “I’m bound to say I don’t think your attitude could well be surpassed.”

John Marcher faintly smiled. “It’s heroic?”

“Certainly—call it that.”

It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. “I am then a man of courage?”

“That’s what you were to show me.”

He still, however, wondered. “But doesn’t the man of courage know what he’s afraid of—or not afraid of? I don’t know that, you see. I don’t focus it. I can’t name it. I only know I’m exposed.”

“Yes, but exposed—how shall I say?—so directly. So intimately. That’s surely enough.”

Related Characters: John Marcher (speaker), May Bartram (speaker)
Page Number: 48-49
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal privation. This indeed gave him one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to him—it showed him that what was still first in his mind was the loss she herself might suffer. “What if she should have to die before knowing, before seeing—?”

Related Characters: John Marcher, May Bartram
Page Number: 52
Explanation and Analysis:

When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure. It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything. And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped. He didn’t care what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet be associated—since he wasn’t after all too utterly old to suffer—if it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence of it. He had but one desire left—that he shouldn’t have been “sold.”

Related Characters: John Marcher
Page Number: 54
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

“You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as of something you were afraid I should find out. Your answer was that I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t, and I don’t pretend I have. But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now how it must have been, how it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst. This,” he went on, “is why I appeal to you. I’m only afraid of ignorance to-day—I’m not afraid of knowledge.”

Related Characters: John Marcher (speaker), May Bartram
Page Number: 56-57
Explanation and Analysis:

[…] they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, none the less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him. Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder, and though he remained staring—though he stared in fact but the harder—turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.

“Well, you don’t say—?”

She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back strangely pale. “I’m afraid I’m too ill.”

[…]

“What then has happened?”

She was once more, with her companion’s help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. “What was to,” she said.

Related Characters: John Marcher (speaker), May Bartram (speaker)
Page Number: 59-60
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had began to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude—that was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left her—what else on earth could she have meant? It wasn’t a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor Marcher at this hour judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would bend his pride to accept it. […] He had lived by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss her. What could be more overwhelming than that?

Related Characters: John Marcher, May Bartram
Related Symbols: The Beast
Page Number: 60-61
Explanation and Analysis:

“It has touched you,” she went on. “It has done its office. It has made you all its own.”

“So utterly without my knowing it?”

“So utterly without your knowing it.” His hand, as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always now, she placed her own on it. “It’s enough if I know it.”

“Oh!” he confusedly breathed, as she herself of late so often had done.

“What I long ago said is true. You’ll never know now, and I think you ought to be content. You’ve had it,” said May Bartram.

“But had what?”

“Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has acted. I’m too glad,” she then bravely added, “to have been able to see what it’s not.”

Related Characters: John Marcher (speaker), May Bartram (speaker)
Page Number: 61-62
Explanation and Analysis:

There were moments as the weeks went by when he would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy of his loss, in order that it might be questioned and his retort, to the relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an irritation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn’t to have begun, so to speak, further back.

[…]

He couldn’t have made known she was watching him, for that would have published the superstition of the Beast. This was what closed his mouth now—now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancy and that the Beast had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat.

Related Characters: John Marcher, May Bartram
Related Symbols: The Beast
Page Number: 64-65
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived.

[…]

The Beast had lurked indeed, and the Beast, at its hour, had sprung; it had sprung in that twilight of the cold April when, pale, ill, wasted, but all beautiful, and perhaps even then recoverable, she had risen from her chair to stand before him and let him imaginably guess. It had sprung as he didn’t guess; it had sprung as she hopelessly turned from him, and the mark, by the time he left her, had fallen where it was to fall.

Related Characters: John Marcher, May Bartram
Related Symbols: The Beast
Page Number: 70-71
Explanation and Analysis:

Through them, none the less, he tried to fix it and hold it; he kept it there before him so that he might feel the pain. That at least, belated and bitter, had something of the taste of life. But the bitterness suddenly sickened him, and it was as if, horribly, he saw, in the truth, in the cruelty of his image, what had been appointed and done. He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened—it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.

Related Characters: John Marcher
Related Symbols: The Beast, May’s Tomb
Page Number: 71
Explanation and Analysis: