Section 9 Summary

This section contains only a monologue from Bernard as he tells his life story, over dinner. Interestingly the person he is speaking to is someone he has met only once before. Bernard is now an old man, but he talks of his childhood and the others in vivid detail. As the story moves into adulthood, he claims they suffered because they were no longer one entity. However, Bernard is now more at ease with himself and does not try to be the all-conquering storyteller. As a result, his observations are acute and some things he mentions things about the characters that were actually thought by the characters in their own monologues. Bernard goes into each character deeply and we find more about them here than elsewhere. It soon becomes apparent that Bernard was the glue that held the group together and he witnessed...