A Civil Action

“But money was the least of Schlichtmann’s worries. Oddly, for a man of lavish tastes, he didn’t care that much about money. He was much more frightened of having staked too much of himself on this one case. He was afraid that if he lost it—if he’d been that wrong–he would lose something of far greater value than money. That in some mysterious way, all the confidence he had in himself, his ambition and his talent, would drain away. He had a vision of himself sitting on a park bench, his hand-tailored suits stuffed into his own green plastic trash bags.”

Schlichtmann’s appearance is important to him, but he is never sure why. By this point, the case has come to define him in his entirety—his image, his future, his self-worth, and his sense of past accomplishments all hinge on it. It raises the question of whether his self-confidence is ever real, or whether it is contingent on the moment’s victory. The passage introduces the theme of The Danger of Obsession and foreshadows Schlichtmann’s downfall, as his vision of himself closely resembles his life in Hawaii after filing for bankruptcy.

“He’s also very generous […] because he knows he’s self-centered and he feels guilty about it.”

Teresa knows Schlichtmann better than anyone else in the book does and suggests that despite his obsessions, he has enough self-awareness to know that he can be self-absorbed to an unseemly degree. This tension between ego and altruism underpins much of the conflict later in the work—e.g., Schlichtmann’s desire to pursue a larger settlement than the families themselves want. Ultimately, the awareness Teresa describes does not prevent him from investing himself in the Woburn case in ways that prove destructive to both Schlichtmann and those around him.