Reflections in a Golden Eye

The Captain has to conjure up excuses to encounter the Private, whom he both desires and hates. When he does see the Private, his body reacts—he becomes dizzy or momentarily loses his vision or hearing. He begins to walk and drive places hoping to see the Private, even lingering outside the soldiers’ barracks. The Captain notices that he hates the Private but doesn’t truly interrogate this feeling or stop pursuing him. One day, he lingers outside the barracks from afternoon into the evening, watching Private Williams from a distance in his car. When the Private goes inside the barracks for supper, the Captain is overcome with profound loneliness. His eyes tear up, and he then drives home.

Leonora and Susie are assembling an elaborate tray of food for Alison, whose heart palpitations on the night of the party two weeks prior were a heart attack; she is now bedbound. When Leonora returns from delivering the food, the Captain tells her a false, malicious story about Anacleto, but Leonora doesn’t understand it. The Captain often makes up similar stories about Anacleto and the Major and passes them off to other people as hearsay; he doesn’t want the Major to know he is the stories’ source.

The Pendertons pick up Major Langdon to go to a dance. Anacleto has the idea to lay bricks at the end of the Langdons’ sidewalk so that the three of them will trip. They walk through the lawn instead, and Anacleto disappointedly removes the bricks. He then attends to Alison until the three return.

Alison wakes up at around midnight. She begins to cry. The past two weeks have been difficult because she is bedbound, unable to escape the Major and her life. She imagines things and cries constantly. As she cries now, from her window she sees a man lurking outside and then entering the Pendertons’ house. She believes that this man must be her husband, sneaking in to see Leonora.

Alison goes to the bathroom, vomits in anger, and then goes to the Pendertons’ without hesitation or forethought. She makes it upstairs and finds the Private in Leonora’s room, watching her as she sleeps. He now looks blankly at Alison. Wordlessly, she leaves. The Captain, who heard the door open and close, intercepts her in the hallway. Alison tells him to look in Leonora’s room. The Captain, thinking she’s telling him the Major is in Leonora’s room with her, conceals his irritation and confusion and tells Alison that she’s ill and “not herself”; he forcibly takes her home. As he drops her off, the Captain sees the Major in the Langdon house and has “mixed feelings of confusion and relief” (377).

The next morning, the Captain learns that Alison has “altogether lost her mind” (377), but the Major does not disclose the details—namely, that when Alison returned home, she asked for a divorce and to borrow a sum of money. Anacleto brought a trunk into her room and they packed for hours. The Major “was forced to acknowledge to himself that she was crazy” (380), and summoned Alison’s doctor, a friend of his. The doctor recommends that Alison be sent to a sanatorium, and a place in Virginia is chosen, based more on frugality than on quality.

The Major, Alison, and Anacleto take the train there a few days later. The Major is proud that he can afford such a nice-looking place, but Alison doesn’t seem to care about how nice it is. At dinner, she looks at everyone surrounding them, and “finally she [speaks] quietly and with bitter relish: ‘My God, what a choice crew!’’’ (380). Major Langdon remembers this forever because it’s the last dinner he ever has with Alison. He leaves the next morning, and she dies of a heart attack on the second night of her stay there.

The Captain turns 35, and he will soon be promoted to major. However, his body is aging quickly, and his obsession with the soldier is taking its toll. He feels perpetually caught up in a “repressed agitation.” He doesn’t understand how events have progressed from the Private spilling coffee on his pants all the way to this “diseased obsession.” He sometimes imagines himself as a Private who looks like Private Williams and who spends time in a community of joyful young men. The Captain walks past the Private’s favorite bench every afternoon. The Private salutes him when he sees him, and when the Captain passes by he feels a strange, nostalgic melancholy.

Major Langdon spends most of his time at the Pendertons’ house, adrift after Alison’s death. He repeats “doleful platitudes concerning God, the soul, suffering, and death” and misses Anacleto (382), wishing he would return to him—Anacleto disappeared after Alison’s death. The Captain is tired of this and just about everything else. His own house—the way it looks and the food he eats there—exasperates him in particular.

During one of the discussions between the Major and the Pendertons, the Major suggests that Anacleto should’ve joined the army, saying it would’ve made a man out of him even though he would have hated it. In response, the Captain asks if the Major means “that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness” (384). When the Major says yes, the Captain says he disagrees, and suddenly,

[w]ith gruesome vividness [he …] looked into his soul and saw himself. For once he did not see himself as others saw him; there came to him a distorted doll-like image […] grotesque in form. The Captain dwelt on this vision without compassion. He accepted it with neither alteration nor excuse. ‘I don’t agree,’ he repeated absently (384).

The Major, not knowing how to respond, relates another anecdote about Alison and Anacleto spending time together, which at the time greatly irritated him.

Leonora has changed and grown somewhat more mature-looking in the past few weeks, and she halfheartedly tries to help comfort the Major. The discussion turns to the night Alison snuck into the Pendertons’ house. Leonora doesn’t remember it (because she was sleeping), but it bothers the Captain that he didn’t go and check the room after Alison told him to do so. He thinks he knows what he would have found there; he believes he “[knows] the answer somewhere in the shadowy unconscious of his mind” (385), but thinking about it makes him uneasy. Leonora then tells a story about Alison and a mule she found, and the Captain remembers that he and Leonora have been feuding about Firebird, whom Leonora blames the Captain for ruining. The conversation finishes. To the Captain, it feels like all three of their lives have ended along with Alison’s. All the Captain really wants is to “break down the barrier” between himself and the Private (388).

On November 12, the Captain passes the Private’s bench and addresses him directly for the first time: “In [the Captain’s] heart there coursed a wild tirade of curses, words of love, supplications, and abuse” (389). But the Captain says nothing and leaves. Afterward, the Private picks a fight in the barracks, which he has done often in the previous two weeks. He’s unaware of Alison’s death (or of who Alison is), but the “dark woman’s” appearance has scared him away from returning to the Penderton house since she caught him in Leonora’s room. The Private has noticed the Captain’s changed behavior but has no sense of it relating to him at all. He still thinks about “the Lady” constantly—always in the bedroom, never outside or in the stables. It is the first time he’s ever felt safe with a woman.

That night, the Private goes back to the Penderton house. The Captain is awake, though slightly drunk and drugged with sleeping pills. He walks by his wife’s room, and as he peers inside, he glimpses through her window a small flame flickering outside, and the Captain sees the Private—“the one for whom [the Captain] sought” (392). He closes his eyes and waits while the Private enters the house through the window. He sees the Private’s silhouette in the hall and then, after a few moments, outlined in the window of his wife’s room. A few “dormant fragments” of memory come to the Captain, and later the Captain will be sure that everything made itself clear to him in that moment; however, this is an illusion. The Captain takes a pistol, goes to his wife’s room, and shoots the Private. Leonora wakes up and looks around her “as though witnessing some scene in a play” (393). Hearing the pistol, the Major comes into the house and runs up the stairs to see the Captain slumped against the wall and the Private lying on the carpet. Even in death, the Private’s face is “unchanged.”