Praise of a man is a natural concomitant of praise of his achievement, and so Menard's alter ego proceeds to heap effusive praise on him. Beginning with the world-weary and intellectually dispiriting, if not condescending, remark that "there is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless," and illustrating his dolorous thesis with a comment to the effect that the eventual fate of entire philosophies is to pass into mere paragraphs or names in a history of philosophy, the narrator thus eases into his true topic: Menard, the man who transcended such fin de siecle truths, the artist who truly did create ex nihilo—or almost, anyway. His praise of the man, however, is as odd and unintentionally condemnatory as his claims respecting his achievement. Menard

derived from these nihilistic verifications [a] singular
. . . determination. He decided to anticipate the vanity
awaiting all...