Chapter 74 "The Cubicle" – Summary, Analysis, and Study Guide
⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This guide contains detailed spoilers for the entire novel. Proceed only if you've finished reading or are comfortable knowing the plot.
Summary
The narrator, Iris Chase, reflects on the darker turn the story has taken, acknowledging that readers already know what happened to Laura. She muses on Laura’s unknowingness of her own doomed fate and recalls Laura’s ordinary, sometimes irritating, sometimes joyful daily life. Iris now sees Laura’s “flashes of joy” as especially poignant. In memory, Laura is a bright-haired girl walking up a hill—a girl singled out only by Iris and the reader, like a figure in a painting with a hidden god of fate behind her.
Iris feels her written account so far seems too frivolous: dresses, dinners, voyages. But she argues that tragedy includes the trivial hours leading to the sudden moment. It is now April; Iris has started walking again after winter. She makes it to the cemetery, finds Laura’s grave cleared of leaves but with a wilting bunch of white narcissi left by an admirer. Iris discards the flowers, annoyed by what she sees as spurious grief.
At a doughnut shop, a young woman (not a waitress) offers to bring Iris coffee, which Iris appreciates as rare politeness. She reflects on youthful ingratitude as necessary armor against being crushed by the past. After coffee, Iris visits the washroom cubicle. The graffiti has been painted over, but new writing appears: initials declaring love, a quote about judgment and experience, an advertisement for a prostitute (“Anita the Mighty Mouth”), and a religious threat in red marker.
Iris playfully imagines that Laura is the true author of these scribblings, speaking to Iris across time. She considers adding a line from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám about the Moving Finger that cannot be cancelled. She thinks such a message would give the other writers a jolt, but she warns herself that leaving a message of fate can be dangerous. The chapter ends with a memory of Reenie saying “think twice” and Laura asking why only twice.
Key Events
- Iris reflects on Laura’s fate and the mundane details that preceded it.
- She visits the cemetery, finds Laura’s grave cleared by a fan, and throws away the wilted flowers.
- She stops at a doughnut shop and is unexpectedly helped by a polite young woman.
- She examines graffiti in the washroom cubicle, noting the competing messages of love, experience, lust, and doom.
- Iris considers writing a quote from poetry on the wall but hesitates, aware of the danger of playing with fate.
Character Development
- Iris Chase: Shows her aging fragility (uses a cane, tires easily). She is simultaneously nostalgic and irritated—by the worshippers of Laura, by the heaviness of the material world, by the thoughtless ingratitude of youth. Yet she finds comfort in anonymity and the messy human voices of graffiti. She teeters between a desire to leave her own indelible mark and a cautionary awareness of consequences.
- Laura (in memory): Presented as a complex figure—not a tragic heroine in life, but ordinary and occasionally joyful. Iris insists on Laura’s ordinariness, which makes her death all the more poignant.
- Reenie: Briefly recalled through her practical, no-nonsense admonition “Think twice,” which Laura playfully challenged.
Themes, Symbols, or Motifs
- Tragedy vs. the mundane: Iris argues that tragedy includes the accumulation of trivial daily acts—clothes, meals, walks—not just the dramatic moment of death. The washroom graffiti juxtaposes the sacred (judgment, love) with the profane (advertisement for sex), mirroring life’s mixture.
- Memory and erasure: The cemetery names are “softened” by time; the graffiti is painted over but replaced. The Rubáiyát stanza on the Moving Finger symbolizes the desire to leave a permanent message, yet Iris knows even that will be painted over or forgotten.
- The “hand of fate”: The chapter toys with the idea that Laura, or Iris herself, might be acting as fate’s agent. The warning “think twice before you wish to make yourself into the hand of fate” cautions against trying to control destiny.
- Generational armor: Iris observes that young people’s “thoughtless ingratitude” protects them from being crushed by the past. The polite young woman at the doughnut shop is an exception, but Iris sees selfishness as a necessary survival trait.
Why This Chapter Matters
This chapter is a pivotal reflective pause. Iris directly addresses the reader’s foreknowledge of Laura’s suicide, moving the narrative from a chronicle of the past to a meditation on how we remember the dead. The washroom cubicle becomes a microcosm of the novel’s central concerns: the struggle to leave a lasting trace, the tension between sacred and profane, and the danger of assuming the role of fate. It also deepens Iris’s character as an old woman grappling with her own mortality and her unfinished story.
Study Questions and Answers
1. Why does Iris find the wilted flowers on Laura’s grave irritating rather than touching? Iris sees them as “spurious grief” – tokens left by admirers who only know Laura as a doomed romantic figure, not a real person. She also resents having to clean up after them, which shows her practical annoyance mixed with a deeper anger at the commodification of Laura’s tragedy.
2. What does the graffiti in the washroom cubicle reveal about Iris’s state of mind? Iris is drawn to the raw, anonymous voices that express desire, judgment, and faith. She fantasizes that Laura is behind them, speaking to her. Her impulse to add a poetic line about the Moving Finger shows her yearning to leave a permanent mark, but her caution about playing “the hand of fate” reveals her ambivalence and fear of unintended consequences.
3. How does the chapter’s opening about Laura connect to Iris’s later actions? Iris begins by insisting that tragedy includes trivial hours, not just the climactic stab or crash. Her own trivial actions – visiting a grave, buying a muffin, reading bathroom graffiti – become part of the tragic fabric of her own story. The chapter blurs the boundary between ordinary life and the shadow of fate that Iris and the reader know is coming.