The Past

Over the course of the novel, the author uses Ransom’s shifting regard for his former life in order to consider the individual’s attachment to the past. At the start of the novel, Ransom is living in a houseboat by himself. He has purchased the craft hoping to “let a fresh dimension into his life” (23). Rather than transforming his circumstances and outlook, the boat has instead become, “unintentionally, a repository of all the talismans of his life . . . Here his half-conscious memories of childhood and the past had been isolated and quantified, like the fragments of archaic minerals sealed behind glass cases in museums of geology” (24, 25). Because Ransom has recently lost his doctoral job at the hospital and been estranged from his wife Judith, he feels unmoored from the versions of reality and self he once relied upon. He therefore uses the houseboat as a...