Summary

Chapter 41 begins the final book of the novel, called “Teacher at the Blackboard.” This section uses the perspective of Jan Landzaat (through a limited third-person narrator), beginning on the day after Christmas. He puts on his socks and shoes, as he hears the weather forecasts call for heavy snow on the radio. He shaves for the first time in four days, combs back his wet hair, and looks at his “new face” (330). In the middle of the night before, when he realized after a “lonely, reheated Christmas dinner” that he didn’t have enough whiskey to drink himself into a stupor, he had an epiphany: “’Here’s what I’ll do,’ he said out loud, ‘Tomorrow I’m going to drive past the house in Zeeland, but I’ll be a different person’” (330).

He decides to pretend that he has friends that he...