This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Tadek describes a growing feeling of impending doom, and a feeling that the universe will disappear as if it isn’t solid. He admits that since the war ended, he has had difficulty making himself shine his shoes or shave regularly. Tadek no longer takes pleasure in looking at women or finding rare books, “thus relating the deliberate senselessness of [his] own fate to that of the Universe” (179). Each day, he goes out through the bombed ruins of the city, walks through masses of poor people who arouse nothing in him, picks up the money that he is entitled to from the government, and returns home. At his desk, Tadek tries to feel something for all of those people as well as for his wife who is downstairs washing dishes. He also attempts to wrap his mind around the significance of what he has experienced, because he plans “to write a great, immortal epic, worthy of this unchanging, difficult world, chiseled out of stone” (180).