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Foreshadowing
Explanation and Analysis—Losing Track of Time:
In the following passage, Egaeus details some symptoms of his monomania, including his tendency to lose track of time:
to lose myself, for an entire night…; to dream away whole days…; to repeat, monotonously, some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind; to lose all sense of motion or physical existence.
Although Egaeus describes these signs as some of the “least pernicious” changes brought on by his disease, in fact, this moment directly foreshadows the exact circumstances that lead to his violation of Berenice. Here, he establishes his habit of losing himself for hours and even days on end in the ceaseless study of mundane objects, which hints at his future obsession with Berenice’s teeth. His impulse to repeat words until they lose any semblance of meaning predicts his later declaration: “que toutes ses dents étaient des idées,” which in English means “that all her teeth were ideas.” In this way, he turns her teeth, like ideas, over and over in his mind until they are not teeth at all but “substances” he must possess at any cost.
Even more terrifying than Egaeus’s lack of control over his obsessions is his spotty memory, which results in the inability to trust his own mind. He's aware that through his “distempered vision” the objects that catch his undivided attention are “invariably frivolous,” but he continues to place extreme and disproportionate importance upon them. Egaeus is caught in a double bind: trapped by the knowledge that his own mind is suspect yet unable to determine the extent of his delusions, he is doomed to watch as his illness outstrips his will.
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