“The Moving Finger” begins with the unnamed narrator learning that Mrs. Grancy has died. He describes the loss as a “shock” and an “an immense blunder of fate” that leaves behind a void in the lives of everyone who knew her. This is especially true for Mr. Grancy, who is completely devastated by his wife’s death and whose entire life gradually disintegrates as he mourns her: his grief affects his mental well-being, his physical health, and even his personal relationships. Mr. Grancy’s years of suffering show that grief can be a powerful and isolating force that has a corrosive effect on people not only emotionally, but physically and interpersonally—essentially destroying the grieving person from within.
Mr. Grancy’s life is completely uprooted when Mrs. Grancy suddenly and unexpectedly dies, and his mental health suffers as a result. After Mrs. Grancy passes away, Mr. Grancy falls into a deep depression. He moves from the U.S. to Turkey, leaving all of his friends behind and throwing himself into a new job in international diplomacy as a way of distracting himself from his grief. The narrator, however, sees that Mr. Grancy’s tough exterior during this time is contrived, and that it actually “testifie[s] to his inner weakness”—inside, Mr. Grancy is suffering immensely. Five years later, once Mr. Grancy has returned to the U.S., he confides in the narrator that he was indeed miserable during these “first black months.” To feel okay again, he admits that he resorted to imagining that Mrs. Grancy was still alive and present with him. The narrator describes this presence as a “ghost” haunting Mr. Grancy—Mr. Grancy is unable to emotionally cope without his wife by his side, and he’s willing to deny reality if it means feeling like she’s still in his life.
In addition to the mental strife that Mr. Grancy experiences as a result of his grief, his personal relationships are also affected, leaving him even more alienated and lonely. Although Mr. Grancy returns to the U.S. and is able to get back in touch with his old friends and revive their traditional Sunday gatherings, he spends most of his time isolated at home in his study. His friends don’t seem able or willing to truly understand what he’s going through. The narrator, for instance, is relieved when he parts ways with Mr. Grancy. He doesn’t think that friendship adequately “perform[s], in such cases, the office assigned to it by tradition,” meaning that friendship, for all its promises of support and loyalty, tends to fall apart in the face of tragedy and upheaval. The narrator also feels a hint of dread at the thought of going to visit Mr. Grancy again, reflecting that “we are apt to feel that our friends’ sorrows should be kept like those historic monuments from which the encroaching ivy is periodically removed.” The narrator’s thoughts suggest that others tend to be repelled by a grieving person, as they’re unsure of how to support them and want to keep their friend’s suffering at a distance. In this way, grief can cause interpersonal damage, further isolating the grieving person and plunging them deeper into loneliness and sorrow.
Mr. Grancy’s mourning also devastates his body and his health, showing that grief can have physical effects. After his initial grieving period, Mr. Grancy’s “body showed its scars. At five-and-forty he was gray and stooping, with the tired gait of an old man.” Though still a relatively young man at 45, Mr. Grancy’s emotional pain has rapidly aged him. He falls seriously ill soon after this, as though he’s literally sick with grief—a physical change that seems to be a manifestation of his inner suffering. And as Mr. Grancy grows older and sicker, he imagines that his beloved portrait of his young wife (which his friend Claydon painted nearly a decade ago) is lonely, just like he is. Afraid of Mrs. Grancy being “left behind” as he ages while she stays “unchangeably young,” Mr. Grancy calls on Claydon to alter the portrait, making Mrs. Grancy appear older. The reader can see, however, that the reasoning Mr. Grancy gives for changing the portrait is just an excuse: as Mr. Grancy physically deteriorates, he wants his wife to deteriorate alongside him, so that he won’t be alone in his suffering. In this way, the decline in Mr. Grancy’s physical health exacerbates the decline in his mental health, leading him to further deny reality and unhealthily cling to someone who’s no longer there.
As Mr. Grancy’s illness worsens, he calls on Claydon to alter Mrs. Grancy’s portrait a second time, making her look even older and giving her an expression that looks as though she knows her husband is going to die. From this point on, the portrait becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. As Mr. Grancy becomes more and more obsessed with keeping Mrs. Grancy in alive, changing the painting to reflect the changes in himself, he grows weaker and sicker until he dies of his illness—just as Mrs. Grancy’s likeness seemed to predict he would. Mr. Grancy’s sorrow and loneliness in the wake of Mrs. Grancy’s death turns him into a shell of his former self, a man so sick with grief and stuck in his past that he is destroyed from the inside out.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Grief and Loneliness ThemeTracker
Grief and Loneliness Quotes in The Moving Finger
The instinctive posture of grief is a shuffling compromise between defiance and prostration; and pride feels the need of striking a worthier attitude in face of such a foe. Grancy, by nature musing and retrospective, had chosen the role of the man of action, who answers blow for blow and opposes a mailed front to the thrusts of destiny; and the completeness of the equipment testified to his inner weakness. We talked only of what we were not thinking of, and parted, after a few days, with a sense of relief that proved the inadequacy of friendship to perform, in such cases, the office assigned to it by tradition.
I wondered whether Grancy, under the recovered tranquillity of his smile, concealed the same sense of [Mrs. Grancy’s] nearness, saw perpetually between himself and the actual her bright unappeasable ghost. He spoke of her once or twice, in an easy incidental way, and her name seemed to hang in the air after he had uttered it, like a chord that continues to vibrate. If he felt her presence it was evidently as an enveloping medium, the moral atmosphere in which he breathed. I had never before known how completely the dead may survive.
“For a week we two lived together—the strange woman and the strange man. I used to sit night after night and question [Mrs. Grancy’s] smiling face; but no answer ever came. What did she know of me, after all? We were irrevocably separated by the five years of life that lay between us. At times, as I sat here, I almost grew to hate her; for her presence had driven away my gentle ghost, the real wife who had wept, aged, struggled with me during those awful years…It was the worst loneliness I’ve ever known. Then, gradually, I began to notice a look of sadness in the picture’s eyes; a look that seemed to say: Don’t you see that I am lonely too?”
After that, for ten years or more, I watched the strange spectacle of a life of hopeful and productive effort based on the structure of a dream. There could be no doubt to those who saw Grancy during this period that he drew his strength and courage from the sense of his wife’s mystic participation in his task.
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I’m an old man now and no mistake. I suppose we shall have to go halfspeed after this; but we shan’t need towing just yet!’
The plural pronoun struck me, and involuntarily I looked up at Mrs Grancy’s portrait. Line by line I saw my fear reflected in it. It was the face of a woman who knows that her husband is dying. My heart stood still at the thought of what Claydon had done.
Grancy had followed my glance. ‘Yes, it’s changed her,’ he said quietly. ‘For months, you know, it was touch and go with me—we had a long fight of it, and it was worse for her than for me.’
