Pincher Martin

Martin clings to his “centre” as he feels an unwanted thought forming in his brain. He’s losing touch with his identity, as if “Christopher and Hadley and Martin were fragments far off” (146). Ultimately, Martin realizes that to preserve his sanity he must face the reality of his situation and, by extension, the unwanted thought: “I shall never get away from this rock” (146).

Suddenly, a desire to survive grips Martin anew. With heroic music by Tchaikovsky and Wagner playing in his head, he leaves the cave and takes his lifebelt to one of the saltwater pools. He fills the lifebelt with saltwater, inserts the tube into his anus, and sits on the bag, creating a makeshift enema. As the music in his head reaches its crescendo, Martin’s bowels finally empty.

When fleeting terror interrupts Martin’s feeling of victory over the rock, he says to himself, “It was something I remembered. I’d better not remember it again. Remember to forget” (153).

Falling rain adds to Martin’s sense that he’s conquered the rock. However, the rain is heavy and accompanied by lightning, thunder, and wind, and he realizes that he’s in the middle of a hurricane. Martin hurries to Food Cliff to grab whatever mussels he can find before the storm becomes too intense. He looks up and sees the Dwarf, who thanks to the foil on its head now resembles “the old woman from the corner of the cellar” (160). Martin begins to playact as if the Dwarf is a scene partner. Meanwhile, dark engravings on a nearby rock terrify him because they look like the “black lightning” Nathaniel described as a sign of the “negation” that heaven brings with it.

Martin cries out, “I’m so alone! Christ! I’m so alone! [...] Because of what I did I am an outsider and alone” (164). His memories of the dark cellar mingle with those of Nathaniel explaining how heaven is “black lightning, destroying everything that we call life” (166). These memories morph into an image of Martin approaching Nathaniel on the deck of the Wildebeest with the intent to push him overboard; the only thing that stops Martin is the sight of the spray from an oncoming torpedo.

Back in the present, soaking wet, Martin says, “I wish I hadn’t kicked off my seaboots when I was in the water” (170). As the storm intensifies, he screams to the sky, begging for pity because he—a strong, handsome man who fought for his country—is now thin, weak, and stuck on a rock. He thinks once more of the cellar and himself as “a small child who must go down, down in his sleep to meet the thing he turned from when he was created” (173).

As the trenches flood and the wind and rain batter his body, Martin seems to embrace his madness as inevitable. The wind scatters the stones of the Dwarf, which he now refers to as “the woman.” He screams, “She is loose on the rock. Now she is out of the cellar and in daylight. Hunt her down!” (176). Martin begins to stab at the scattered stones with his knife, yelling, “That’ll teach you to chase me out of the cellar through cars and beds and pubs, you at the back and me running, running after my identity disc all the days of my life!” (176).

Sitting on a rock beside him is a figure with indistinct features, which Martin acknowledges as a hallucination. It asks if Martin has had enough and is ready to give up. Martin screams, “I have a right to live if I can!”, to which the hallucination responds, “Where is that written?” (180). The hallucination asks what makes Martin so special that he survived while the other sailors died. Martin says he wanted to live more than the others.

As the black lightning slices up the sky, Martin yells, “I shit on your heaven!” (184). His “centre” tries, unsuccessfully, to protect the rock from two giant lobster claws. Before long, all that remains are Martin’s centre, the claws, and the black lightning—until the lightning obliterates everything “in a compassion that was timeless and without mercy” (185).

A British officer named Davidson exits a small watercraft arriving on an island in the North Atlantic. On the shore, he meets a man named Mr. Campbell, who directs him to a lean-to where he can find the body of another British officer that washed ashore. Davidson takes a drink from his flask and enters the lean-to, exiting a few moments later with a small brown disc. He then directs his men to carry the body to their watercraft.

Mr. Campbell asks Davidson cryptically, “You know nothing of my—shall I say—official beliefs, Mr. Davidson; but living for all these days next to that poor derelict—Mr. Davidson. Would you say there was any—surviving? Or is that all? Like the lean-to?” (192). Unsure of Mr. Campbell’s meaning, Davidson replies that the sailor—whose name is Martin—did not suffer before he died, adding, “He didn’t even have time to kick off his seaboots” (192).