In the following essay, Deasy examines the first fourteen paragraphs in "He," tracing the development of Porter's central concern: "failure to face reality leads to frustration."

Katherine Anne Porter's recent novel has served to emphasize a pre-occupation in all her work: to trace to its sources and understand the logic of what she calls the "majestic and terrible failure of the life of man in the Western world." The early stories are short exercises, what the preface to Flowering Judas calls "fragments" of a larger plan concerned with this theme. They were written, she says, in a period of grotesque dislocations in a whole society when the world was heaving in the sickness of a millennial change.

The story "He" is a good illustration of how one aspect of this general concern can be developed and complicated to the point where it becomes the primary structural factor...