SOURCE: "On Literature and the Reader's Beliefs (with Special Reference to De Waterman by Arthur van Schendel)," in Dichter und Leser: Studien zur Literature, edited by Ferdinand van Ingen, and others, Wolters-Noordhoff, 1972, pp. 143-50.

In the following essay, Mooij discusses psychological beliefs evidenced in De Waterman.

[Nearly] all novels, including De Waterman, appeal to beliefs in that they merely suggest or hint at the motives and causes which underlie certain acts performed by the characters. Of course, the novelist may deliberately try to make the behaviour of his characters incomprehensible, but this is done, I think, only in a minority of cases.

One prominent example in De Waterman is the behaviour of the grown-up people in Gorkum towards the boy Maarten. Apparently there is here some connection between religion, parochialism, and severity in education; a connection which is indeed not altogether out of the common. On the basis...