The Invention of Morel

The narrator watches Faustine and Morel for 17 days and concludes that even if Morel was referring to Faustine in his speech—and he doesn’t believe that Morel was—Faustine does not return his love. The narrator notes all their little contacts, even when their legs touch under a table, which he calls an accident. He thinks that Morel would be angry with him for spreading word of his invention. He worries that Faustine would too, though if she had had a falling out with Morel, the narrator suspects she would be on his side. The fact the narrator never heard of the invention while living in Caracas suggests to him that Morel is dead. But then, he muses, one of the others on the island might have told people—unless they all died. The narrator revisits the fact that no one believed Morel, or they thought he was disconnected from reality, or that they were all hallucinating.

Escaping is still perilous, and the narrator feels that the images protect him from his pursuers as they would forget about him when they saw the others on the island. However, he thinks about finding Faustine out in the real world and how she would laugh when he told her how he spoke to her image. He records this idea, ostensibly to be able to discard it. Spending so much time with the images, he has come to appreciate the newness of each repeating moment they have, whereas his life is more unpredictable and chaotic.

He wonders where he would find Faustine, piecing together things she says, such as mentioning Canada. He is afraid to speculate that she might be dead. Instead, he contemplates the difficulty he will have leaving the island; his boat has fallen apart, the trees are rotten, and the only ship he ever sees is just an image. He also fears that if he does meet Faustine, she will react badly to his admissions because he would be a stranger to her.

With the low tide, the machines stop working, and the images disappear. When the tide rises again, the narrator races to the machines to see if he can understand how they work. He enters the power plant area through the hole he made in the wall. The machines start working, but he feels dejected because he still cannot understand them. He turns to leave, but the hole in the wall is gone. Feeling the walls to ascertain that it’s not an optical illusion, he wonders if he had been so distracted that he failed to notice someone fixing the wall. He tries hitting the wall with the iron bar he used to make the hole, but his blows have no effect. He desperately attacks other parts of the wall.

Pieces of masonry fall, and he collapses to the floor in exhaustion, but looking around, he panics because the wall appears whole and undamaged again. Looking up at the skylight, he sees the tree branch split apart and then fuse together again. It dawns on him that the walls, like the visitors and fish, are part of the projection. He may have to wait to get out until the machines stop running. He realizes that Morel recorded this room to protect the machines, and thus, his immortality. The narrator figures that Morel probably didn’t understand the tides and that there would be an interruption in the projections.

The narrator recalls a story about a Japanese sailor who slowly died in a sunk submarine and wrote a letter detailing his demise. He realizes that if he keeps thinking this way, he will not be able to solve the problem of stopping the machines. As time passes, he has nervous attacks, headaches, and a yearning for fresh air. Writing calms him. Suddenly, he has an idea that helps him make sense of the motors. He simply disconnects them and goes outside.

The narrator goes outside and finds various parts of the machine, as well as portable receivers, recorders, and projectors. He records some flowers, insects, and frogs. Unthinkingly, he also puts his left hand in front of the receiver. At first, it doesn’t seem like a big deal that only his hand is reproduced. However, the plants he filmed all die within six hours and the frogs in 15. The copied images remain pristine. Still, he speculates that it must be harmless, that the flowers and frogs died from lack of water or food. He attributes the burning sensation in his left hand, where some skin has fallen off, to fear, not the machine.

The narrator vacillates between considering suicide and speculating about Morel’s speech and invention. He wonders if Morel apologized to his friends for recording them without their knowledge; some people fear having their photographs taken, thinking that their souls will transfer into the image, and they will die. Morel’s idea that the images have souls suggests that the living transmitters lose theirs. It strikes the narrator, then, that Morel staged the collective deaths of his friends to preserve their images for eternity. The corpses on the freighter found by the Namura are Morel and his friends. The rumors about a mysterious disease keep visitors from the island and keep his immortality machines safe.

This means that Faustine is dead, too. The narrator now finds life intolerable without the hope of a real Faustine somewhere in the world. He plans to complete his diary as a record of what he knows and has experienced. He finishes reading the Bélidor book on tides, which explains why he had trouble predicting them. The week that Morel recorded is repeated throughout the year, so in different seasons, the positions of the sun and moon do not align. While new plants and trees grow abundantly, the ones recorded have died. A room’s arrangement during a recording is preserved; an outside viewer cannot alter the recording. The narrator finds records about the ill-fated Charlie, but he opts not to read them because they will disturb him.

The narrator tries to explain why Morel acted the way he did. He speculates that he unsuccessfully tried to woo Faustine, so he arranged a pleasant eternity together with her and his friends. He killed all of them and himself out of a desire to be with her. Suddenly, the narrator appreciates that wild aspect of Morel because he has felt that way, too. He takes inspiration from that and studies Faustine for two weeks so he knows what she will do and say. He records himself interacting with her so that it seems he was always there, and he and Faustine are in love. He would like to remove Morel from the recordings, but he knows that he cannot; the images are interdependent, and removing one would make the others disappear, too. The one mystery he never solves is what Faustine, Dora, and Alec do when they go into a room together, but otherwise, he tries to keep his spirit light.

The sensation in his hand spreads. His skin, hair, and nails fall off, and he loses his sight. His obsession with parsing the details of Morel’s relationship with Faustine keeps him from worrying too much about his deterioration. He still has moments when he thinks he is just imagining his disease because the machines are harmless and Faustine is alive. He recalls the troubled Venezuela he left and turning his back on a political figure, Valentin Gomez. He takes comfort in what he can still see—the images of himself interacting with Faustine as if they were lovers. He hopes that if someone ever reads his diary and invents a machine to “assemble disjoined presences” (103), they will let him stay in her consciousness.