“‘I chose you. Nobody gave you to me. Nobody said that’s the one for you. I picked you out. Wrong time, yep, and doing wrong by my wife. But the picking, the choosing. Don’t ever think I fell for you, or fell over you. I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind. My mind. And I made up my mind to follow you too.’” (135)
In a story where even the narrator is a biased, untrustworthy, probably-lying sneak, this rings as the falsest sentiment in the book – and also a perfectly true one. False because any illusion of control over one’s emotions, to love or not to love, is an utter farce, and while one may choose one’s lover as one chooses a loaf of bread, one may not choose whether or not to love. Joe’s actions belie his assertions that he is in control – his obsessive need to follow Dorcas and confront her rather than let her go is a direct contradiction to his ability to choose, his claims to ‘making up his mind’ to hunt her notwithstanding. That is the action of a man who has no control and is losing what little semblance of it he has left. Shooting Dorcas is not the action of a man “making his mind” but of a love-crazed slave to his needs and instincts. Even his unconscious shift from “she” to “you”, unwittingly speaking directly to the object of his obsession, betrays his unstable and unrestrained state of mind.
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