Significance of Chapter 10 in ATKM

I’d like to discuss some of the significant quotes from the last chapter of ATKM.  The first quote that catches my attention says “…and soon now we shall go out of the house and go into the convulsion of the world, out of history and into history and the awful responsibility of Time” (661). The Cass Mastern story, which takes up most of Chapter 4, is not relevant to the novel's plot, but it is very important to the novel's theme. Cass Mastern's journals describe a man who slowly learns the same lesson of responsibility that Jack must learn during the course of the story. At first, Cass is nonchalant about his hedonistic behavior, but after his friend's suicide and Annabelle's selling of Phebe, Cass goes to great length to make amends and to undo the consequences of his actions. As a young man, Jack is unable to understand Cass's motivations; by the end of the novel, he writes that he "now may come to understand" them. Thus the Cass Mastern story works as a kind of index of Jack's development--the closer he comes to understanding it, the closer he comes to being ready to step into the "awful responsibility of Time."

Moreover, another quote that is worth a discussion says, “she gave me a new picture of herself, and that meant, in the end, a new picture of the world” (652). Here Jack is referring the knowledge that his mother gives him right before she decides to move away. The knowledge that she gives him, which is that she is still in love with Irwin, proves to jack that his mother is capable of love and this helps jack overcome his numbness. Jack is then able to return to Anne. His numbness was caused by confrontation of responsibility. Also, the quote saying “Duffy was the villain and I was the averaging hero. I had kicked Duffy around and my head was as big as a balloon with grandeur. Then all at once something happened and the yellow taste was in the back of my mouth “ (628). Here Jack realizes that he has blamed Duffy in full for willies death, and that blaming Duffy is an admission that someone was directly responsible for what happened. If someone’s responsible for an action, then great twitch theory cant hold up. And if someone’s responsible for willies death, jacks forced to face the measure of responsibility that he himself bears.