Summary

The narrator, now uncertain whether he and Mahood are the same person, begins to detail a story about his own family, the details of which come from Mahood. The narrator describes how he found himself in a “vast yard or campus, surrounded by high walls,” and assumed it was his home replete with his family members, “grandpa, grandma, little mother and the eight or nine brats” (311); however, Mahood soon tells him that they all died by sausage-poisoning before he was able to reach them, and he describes the narrator’s painful process of trying to reach them, all while being informed that he was missing an arm and a leg.

Voicing his doubts regarding all that Mahood told him, the narrator wonders whether this story of his family was invented by his tormentors to cause him pain, “each according to his particular notion of...