The Heart of the Matter

These are the combinations of numbers that ring in Scobie’s head before Louise’s departure to South Africa. After Scobie fails to secure a bank loan for two hundred pounds, he begins obsessing over his failure to fulfill his responsibility to Louise. This numerical motif is important for two reasons. First, it represents a fixation. In psychology, a fixation refers to an obsessive attachment to people or things. It is a concept developed by the psychologist Sigmund Freud to indicate how early psychosexual attachments or “investments” linger into older age. While The Heart of the Matter does not contain overt psychosexual undertones, it does explore other aspects of Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, particularly the ego’s methods of self-preservation through unconscious distortion of reality.

Scobie’s pride, ego, and sense of pity represent a worthy case study for psychoanalysis in literature. His fixation on the combinations of 200, 020, 002 give readers crucial psychological access at a critical moment in Scobie’s narrative arch: his failure to live up to his responsibility to Louise.

Second, the combinations of 200, 020, 002 appear most prominently around the time of Pemberton’s suicide. Greene foreshadows Scobie’s own suicide using various techniques. It is not coincidental that Scobie’s mental state unravels precisely at the point of two interrelated plot developments: Louise’s request to be sent to South Africa and the death of Pemberton. At this precise moment, Scobie suffers from unpleasant dreams involving variations of the number 200 in which Pemberton and Louise were “obscurely linked” (79). Greene is drawing the reader’s attention to this motif to forecast Scobie’s eventual downfall.