Part 4, pages 185-199 Summary

Winter comes, and the narrator is still living in the lodging house, even though he is broke and three weeks behind in the rent. He is writing again, but his work has been no good. He is working on an allegory about a fire in a bookstore, and he gets a little food from his landlady each day. His landlady comes upstairs with a grocery bill and asks him to look at it for her, to find an error. He reviews it, and while he's looking, his brain seems to stop working. As the landlady leaves, she tells him that he needs to start paying her for his room. He promises to pay when he's finished his article. He just needs some inspiration.

The narrator looks out the window, trying to decide how broken his mind is and watching...