Summary

Returning to his room, Molloy sees his son’s stamp albums on his desk and wonders whether his son snuck away some of his favorite stamps. He also wonders whether he should have relented to son’s desire to keep his stamps, but he decides that such an action would undermine his parental authority. He puts sleeping-powder in some milk and brings it to his son, who is already sleeping, but Moran wakes up and gives him the milk. Feeling restless, and distracting himself from his mission to find Molloy, Moran thinks that there is something in his house that is keeping him from leaving. Eventually he realizes that his house “has nothing to do with the kind of nothingness in the midst of which [he] stumbled,” but chooses to blame it anyway for “a brief moment of factitious freedom (116).

After going about the...