Chapter Three, The Utility of Fiction Summary

The narrator arrives home to his apartment, where he relaxes with the mail and reflects on his true vision of himself as a sedate, bookish man at heart with little ambitions besides enjoying the creature comforts of home. However, he finds it impossible to suppress the dread he feels being home alone. The apartment is the second one he lived in with his wife, Amanda, the apartment they moved into to make room for their wedding gifts. He reminisces about Amanda, and remembers her as a pretentious, social climbing young woman with materialistic aspirations. Her work as a model now symbolizes for him the shallowness of her intellectual life.

He considers writing, feeling that his sense of suffering would theoretically make for the stuff of great art.

"You have always wanted to be...