The time of my end approaches…Just a month from this day, on September 20, 1850, I shall be sitting in this chair, in this study, at ten o’clock at night, longing to die, weary of incessant insight and foresight, without delusions and without hope. Just as I am watching a tongue of blue flame rising in the fire, and my lamp is burning low, the horrible contraction will begin at my chest. I shall only have time to reach the bell, and pull it violently, before the sense of suffocation will come.
The opening paragraphs sets the circumstances of the story to come. A first-person narrator is going to be looking back upon his life. Unless, of course, his story is about his final days to come. Either way, this opening line lets it be known immediately that the narrator is approaching death and knows it and that is the significant element here. From that opening line of the first paragraph through the content covered in the ellipsis above to the opening line of the second paragraph the writer quickly moves from being merely someone aware of a terminal condition meeting its appointment with mortality at some still vague point in the near-future to being a person who knows the exactly moment and circumstances of his own death. And, since it is also made clear that this will not be death by suicide, the pertinent question becomes: how does he know this?
…this superadded consciousness, wearying and annoying enough when it urged on me the trivial experience of indifferent people, became an intense pain and grief when it seemed to be opening to me the souls of those who were in a close relation to me—when the rational talk, the graceful attentions, the wittily-turned phrases, and the kindly deeds, which used to make the web of their characters, were seen as if thrust asunder by a microscopic vision…
This is a lot of fancy writing that can certainly prove to be an obstruction to many readers, but it is rather easily boiled down to essentials that lack the fancy. “Superadded consciousness” is the term the narrator uses to describe an ability acquired during his late teenage years to see visions of the future exactly as they later occur in reality. This ability seems to have no definite rules, regulations or codified limitations: it can allow him to see a meaningless bit of the future of strangers as well as profoundly emotional moments in the life of those he loves. Not to mention supremely important events from his own future.
I shrank especially from the sight of this new maid, because her advent had been announced to me at a moment to which I could not cease to attach some fatality: I had a vague dread that I should find her mixed up with the dreary drama of my life—that some new sickening vision would reveal her to me as an evil genius.
Superpowers in superhero movies usually come equipped with certain rules. Call it the Kryptonite Effect if you will, but there always seems to be some kind of unwritten rules that impose limitations on the extent and abilities of those abilities. For Latimer, the only rule seems to be that he has no control over it. Either he gets a vision of someone or he doesn’t. Unfortunately for him, one those who fall into the latter category is the new maid his detestable wife have hired. By this point, the attraction that Bertha held when she was his brother’s fiancé has long since faded as a result of becoming his wife. The two can barely stand to be in each other’s presence. Making this bad situation all the worse is that Mrs. Archer, the new maid, seems to be conspiratorially close to his wife. Making that bad situation the absolute worst is that for some reason Mrs. Archer seems to be immune to his ability to peer into her future. Perhaps this accounts for the revelation of what some might term a pretty serious case of paranoia at work in this excerpt. The older woman who has become the new maid is an evil genius? Really?
“I want to make an experiment on this woman, if you will give me permission. It can do her no harm—will give her no pain—for I shall not make it until life is extinct to all purposes of sensation.”
Charles Meunier is an old childhood friend of Latimer. In fact, he is the only real friend that the narrator ever mentions. Near the end of the story, he arrives at Latimer’s home after many years in which the two have not contact. During that time he has attained a high status of respect as a physician. It just so happens that the night he shows up out of the blue, that potential evil genius—Mrs. Archer, the maid—is quite near death from a case of peritonitis. As a physician, there is nothing he can do to save her life. But as a mad scientist type daring to poke his nose into the realm of God where man should not dare to tread…he’s got a plan. Well, an experiment at any rate, though admittedly one that has proven to be an astonishing success with the animals which have so far been his only subjects. He asks Latimer for permission to try the experiment on Mrs. Archer which absolutely must take place within a matter of minutes after her heart has finally ceased pumping blood through her body. The results of experiment prove wildly successful and even more insightful.
