- Let’s all start with some philosophical reflections, shall we?
- If you really think about it, do you actually know the people around you? Do you really?
- If not, where does that leave you? Sad and lonely? Exactly.
- Our narrator starts out this chapter with some cheerful reflections.
- You don’t know the people you love. Not really. Hey, we don’t know the people we love. Every man is an island. It’s all very existential.
- Actually, it’s all very good writing, as well. We totally recommend that you check it out. It’s only about a paragraph long.
- The synopsis, though, is this: death sucks so badly because it forces us to realize how much we don’t know about the people around us.
- Meanwhile, Jerry (the deliverer of the message from the last chapter) is sitting in an alehouse, puzzling over the meaning of his latest assignment.
- He can’t figure out the message that he’s supposed to deliver, at all. Nonetheless, he decides to set off to London to deliver it.
- Meanwhile, the mail coach rattles its way down the road to Dover.
- Inside, Mr. Lorry dozes as he thinks. All of the sounds in the mail coach begin to sound like the sounds he knows so well—the sounds of Tellson's bank.
- Despite the comforting sounds of the bank, however, Mr. Lorry remains uneasy.
- He’s uneasy because he’s been given a difficult task: he’s about to dig up the dead.
- Ugh! Wait, isn’t that illegal?
- Well, yes. But that’s not the sort of digging we’re talking about. We’ll get to that later.
- For now, though, Mr. Lorry imagines a conversation that he has with the dead.
- He asks the dead man if he’s been recalled to life; the dead man says that he doesn’t know.
- He asks the dead man if he’d like to see "her."
- The man has a different answer for each time Mr. Lorry imagines the conversation. Sometimes he’s very happy, other times he’s almost angry.
- Playing the conversation out in his head over and over again, Mr. Lorry finally asks the dead man how long he’s been buried.
- The answer, "eighteen years," terrifies Mr. Lorry.