Vilnius pedagogical university faculty of foreign languages department of english philology

from the table is all I ever heard. Poverty’s a terrible thing.” (The Centaur, p. 63) George also mentions: “I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since I was four years old.” (The Centaur, p. 149) Consequently, he did not know “what it was like to be young.” (The Centaur, p. 99) He was engaged in a variety of jobs – beginning with door-to-door salesman of encyclopedias, the driver of the sightseeing bus, and ending with a hotel bellhop and even a dishwasher.
Throughout the novel Caldwell experiences moral as well as physical pain, he lives in a “world with all its oppressive detail of pain” (The Centaur, p. 127). First, the arrow piercing his ankle during the lesson causes him unbearable pain. Then, his tooth hurts all the time, he even replies to Peter when his son mentions the coldness of the wheel: “To tell the truth, Peter, my tooth hurts so much I don’t notice it.” (The Centaur, p. 72) Caldwell experiences pain low in his body, “the ache […] revives and enwraps him like a folded wing.” (The Centaur, p. 173) There is an interesting phrase in the novel pronounced by Doctor Appleton: “Health […] is an animal condition. Now most of our ill-health comes from two places-the brain and the back. We made two mistakes; one was to stand up and the other was to start thinking.” (The Centaur, p. 124) These words as if prove that Caldwell is different from the others – he is a bag of different kinds of pain because he thinks, he is not an animal-like:


By searching through his body he can uncover any colour and shape of pain he wants; the saccharine needle of the toothache, the dull comfortable pinch of his truss, the restless poison shredding in his bowels, the remote irritation of a turned toenail gnawing the toe squeezed beside it in the shoe, the little throb above his nose from having used his eyes too hard in the last hour, and the associated but different ache along the top of his skull, like the soreness left by his old leather football helmet after battering scrimmage down in the Lake Stadium. (The Centaur, p. 180)

Caldwell had a dream to travel across the country, but in reality he “never got within smelling distance of” Florida”. (The Centaur, p. 77) It seems that everything is wrong, everything is miserable in his life. Talking with a hitchhiker George observes: “I was awake all last night trying to remember something pleasant and I couldn’t do it. Misery and horror; that’s my memories.” (The Centaur, p. 81) He also states: “What does it feel like to win? […] Jesus, I’ll never know.” (The Centaur, p. 130) His life is blank and monotonous. When Peter says his father that he has hope, George replies: “Do you? That makes me awfully proud to hear that, Peter. I never had any.” (The Centaur, p. 172) He himself has no room for hope: “his illness, his debts, the painful burden of land his wife has saddled him with – all these problems itch in his brain for expression.” (The Centaur, p. 175)

Teaching ignorant and indifferent pupils tortures Caldwell: “That’s the one thing you learn in teaching; people forget everything you tell ‘em. I look at those dumb blank faces
every day and it reminds me of death. You fall through those kids’ heads without a trace.” (The Centaur, p. 86) He compares teaching to fighting for life; he must do it in order to feed his family. His words make sense, as Peter narrates:


That was the way of the cruel children. An hour after they had goaded him to the point of frenzy (flecks of foam would actually appear in the corners of his mouth and his eyes would become like tiny raw diamonds), they would show up in his room, anxious to seek advice, make confessions, be reassured. And the instant they had left his company they would mock him again. (The Centaur, pp. 93-94)

Peter notices that at school his father looks “sallow and nauseated, his temples glazed and hollow; […] addled and vehement shipwreck of a man; Deifendorf had stolen his strength; teaching was sapping him.” (The Centaur, p. 96) Caldwell thinks he is a loser; he experiences misfortunes all his life: