I found myself a bit confused yet interested when reading chapter 3. I felt like most of the dialogue by the great doctor and the audience and the manner in which the narrative of the chapter progressed left me lost during the reading. When I reread the chapter from the time the doctor came out until the end, I could tell that the Doctor was relaying the important points the great doctor was making while distracting himself and the reader with his own mental commentary of the audience members’ commentary. The Doctor seemed to be more concerned with the people around him, what they thought about him, and what bothered him about the experience than he was with the actual lecture. With his judgmental commentary throughout the entire chapter, I found the two opposing passages to be noteworthy:

“In an effort not to melt into the amphitheater of eagerness, the Doctor turns his head as much as possible in order to give Monsieur Eager a look that says, Please, be less eager with your knees.

Monsieur Eager looks directly at the Doctor – is he pressing his knees even more firmly into the Doctor’s back? – as if to say, And what of it?” (32)

“The great doctor’s monkey squeals again. “That poor beast locked up somewhere,” says the high forehead sitting in front of the Doctor, a man whose back has been suffering from the Doctor’s own eager knees.” (35)

I want to know what the significance of the eager knees are (if there even is any). Now, I have a few ways of reading these two passages and I hope I’m not thinking too deeply into it. (1 – a low-stakes reading) The Doctor assumes that Monsieur Eager (a nickname to mock the man I’m guessing) is digging his knees into his back purposely, meanwhile he never told him that he was hurting him. However, doesn’t take notice of his own knees digging into the person in front of him’s back. Even when he notices it, he doesn’t mention that he moves his knees away from him. I think this says something about his character as being a bit narcissistic since he complains about Monsieur Eager but recognizes he’s doing the same thing to another person. (2 – a less likely reading that I’m having trouble putting into words) Monsieur Eager is a character in the story that Casey uses to represent the Doctor’s own eagerness. It seems the Doctor doesn’t want to seem eager like the rest of the “high aristocratic foreheads” in the crowd so when he becomes eager he tries to stop it. (3) My last reading of it is actually just a series of questions: What is the signifcance of the Doctor noticing his knees have been in the person in front of him’s back right after he shows his sympathy for the locked up monkey? Is the monkey just a figure for a person with mental illness that these doctors/aspiring doctors are forced to view as caged animals on display? Can all of these characters in this chapter be seen as symbols for something larger than themselves?

The first passage where we see the Doctor and the great doctor’s beliefs differing is on the topic about the soul:

“The keeping that comes next fills the amphitheater. It might be a tree falling; it has that momentum, the sense of anticipation in advance of something inevitable and loud. It is the girl, the Doctor thinks. It is the sound of her very soul. The great doctor will be proven wrong – the soul does not have the regularity of a mechanism, it is not so easily described after all. Even as he thinks this, he realizes it is a childish wish” (47).

At the great doctor’s lecture about the hysterial woman, the Doctor wants the great doctor’s  claim, that the soul has the regularity of a mechanism, to be proven wrong. However, the only dialogue from the great doctor about “the regularity of a mechanism” doesn’t refer to it in comparison to the soul. This confused me, but then I decided to question WHY the Doctor would make this connection between the soul and the great doctor’s dialogue, what he means by the “soul,” and why it is so important to him that it not be true. This confused me even more. In an attempt to contextualize this, the only thing I could make of this is that the Doctor has something he’s not telling the reader directly (or already has said and I just missed it).