“The Beast in the Jungle” is a vivid tale about the life of two friends who became entangled and lost because of their own beliefs, by Henry James. The narration is conducted on behalf of the protagonist, John Marcher, who thinks that his life is doomed to an obscure catastrophe. Out of a curiosity that turned into love, May Buttram stays by her friend, John Archer’s side throughout his ruined life as they both watch and waited for the imaginary catastrophe to occur. The disaster was the reason he didn’t live his life and let it slip through his fingers unknowingly. Life must be lived. May Batram was curious and inquisitive of Marcher’s thought, a curiosity that turned into loyal love for Marcher.
When Marcher had first met May it had been in Naples, though to his recollection it had been Rome. May put him in the right and he “accepted her amendments, enjoyed her corrections,” (407). He was holding her in high regard now as he had ten years prior when he told her of his secret. This secret was one quoted from Marcher by May as from “(his) earliest time, as the deepest thing within (him), the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly terrible,” (411). May had an eagerness for knowledge in her younger years with the aim of witnessing Marcher’s disaster.
Throughout ten years of not seeing each other May remembered and quoted John Marcher’s words about his secret whereas he had “lost the consciousness of having taken (her) so far into (his) confidence” (410) and “that he really didn’t remember the least thing about her” (407). May was ever intrigued by Marcher and vowed that in being “the only person in the world” (410) to know of Marcher’s secret she would “watch with (him)” (414) for the disaster which was yet to come. Marcher’s forgetfulness and sudden decision making tended to lend aid to his not seizing life and let him continue with his created disaster dragging May down it’s path of wasted years along side. For years May and Marcher used themselves to look normal, and May often remarked, “What saves us, you know, is that we answer so completely to so usual an appearance: that of a man and a woman whose friendship has become such a daily habit, or almost, as to be at last indispensable” (420).
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As the years crept by May and Marcher constantly see each other still waiting and watching for what was never to occur on it’s own. On such a visit they got to discussing the situation of themselves and of the apparent lack of a catastrophe. Marcher, concerned that May had wasted her interests on nothing, commented that, “Doesn’t it sometimes come to you, as time goes on, that you curiosity is not being particularly repaid?” (421). This was the day May told him her watch was over and her curiosity satisfied. When he asked if it was all over, the end of their watch she said, “this is not the end of our watch. That is it isn’t the end of yours. You have everything still to see” (424). Marcher being scared that she knew something stated “You know something I do not. You know what is to happen.
It’s so bad you’re afraid I’ll find out” (424). This was the point when May had realized that nothing Marcher had ever believed would happened would happen and that he had wasted his life and she had inevitably wasted hers as well through her love and loyalty to him. May was failing in health and kept her realization nobly to herself in her love for Marcher and of him not having to take the fact that everything in life he had waited and lived, or not lived for, was all for nothing. On day before she died, she said to Marcher of what did and was happening that “includes all the loss and all the shame that are unthinkable” (433).
After her death Marcher traveled to Asia for a year before returning, still ignorant to his life, or lack there of. He visited May’s grave and this was where the realization May wished and prayed he would not come to hit him and “how hugely it glared at him!” (450). Marcher “had not lived” (450) and “she had prayed he mightn’t know” (450). In the end Marcher had been hit with his disaster, on he waited his whole life for and manifested himself, when this realization hit him, “the Beast had indeed lurked, and the Beast, in it’s hour, had sprung” (450). Life must be lived, not waited around for.
