About three months ago—that is to say, toward the end of May of this year of 1900—the writer whose name appears on the title-page received as noteworthy a letter, and packet of papers, as it has been his lot to examine.
The opening lines set the stage for the complex arrangement of narrative. Even the term “narrator” is really ambiguous as it is really difficult to determine exactly who should be worthy of this identity. One of the aspects of what is essentially an example of the last-man-on-earth genre that makes this novel worthy of academic attention is its bearing on the concept of the unreliable narrator. If ever the narration of a book could be said to distinctly unreliable and open to interpretation, it is The Purple Cloud. And it makes this clear right from its opening line.
She replied: "Us are forty-five miles within: us read, and another writes"; from which I concluded that she was some fifteen to thirty years in the future, perusing an as yet unpublished work. After that, during some weeks, I managed to keep her to the same subject, and finally, I fancy, won pretty well the whole work. I believe you would find it striking, and hope you will be able to read my notes.
This quote is from the “noteworthy letter” the author/narrator received. The letter is, in turn, describing the “packet of papers” which he also sent. The packet of papers comprise the transcript recording the words spoken by the “she” mentioned here. That woman is named Mary Wilson and she is a medium of sorts capable of speaking with people from a point in their future. Thus, the unreliability of the narrator proper of the story is called into question since it is a transcript of a story not yet written as told by a person in the future to a person in a trance sometime in the past. Yeah, no kidding.
He used to say that the universe was being frantically contended for by two Powers: a White and a Black; that the White was the stronger, but did not find the conditions on our particular planet very favourable to his success; that he had got the best of it up to the Middle Ages in Europe, but since then had been slowly and stubbornly giving way before the Black; and that finally the Black would win—not everywhere perhaps, but here—and would carry off, if no other earth, at least this one, for his prize.
The narrator of the actual events which are supposed to take place in the future becomes that last man on earth…of a sort. His mental and emotional state moves in a non-linear line through various states of sanity. At one point he recalls a man he met while attending Cambridge named Scotland who, it becomes increasingly clear, wielded a tremendous influence upon his psychological condition. Here he attributes a philosophical ideology of the idea of “The White” and “The Black” engaging in a cosmological battle for dominance, but from this point forward it becomes increasingly clear that this idea has ever since essentially been the functioning authority of the narrator’s life with multiple references made to the powers of the The White and The Black throughout the rest of the text.
There was a man whom I met once…his name now is far enough beyond scope of my memory, lost in the vast limbo of past things. But he used to talk continually about certain 'Black' and 'White' Powers, and of their strife for this world. He was a short man with a Roman nose, and lived in fear of growing a paunch…I forget what his name was…very profound was the effect of his words upon me, though, I think, I used to make a point of slighting them. This man always declared that 'the Black' would carry off the victory in the end: and so he has, so he has.
The viability of the powers of The White and The Black are also eventually brought into the focus of theme of the unreliability of the text. Consider that the “meat” of the story is the narration of a man from a point in the future being transmitted via psychic connection to a woman in the past which is then transcribed and sent to an author for consideration of publishability. But that narrator from the future is himself admittedly affected by a dementia causing lapses in memory: several names from the past are forgotten or confused.
By this point, any attentive reader would also start to question whether there ever really was a man at Cambridge named Scotland or anything who was the originator of the concept of a cosmic battle between The White and the Black. Perhaps Mr. Jeffson had long since reached the state of unreliability even on the subject of who really came up with guiding philosophical ideology controlling his life. Though framed as a simple science fiction story, some academics and scholars have suggested that The Purple Cloud is really far less an example of the sub-genre of last-man-on-earth than it is a serious eschatological debate about the meaning of life and, even more importantly, how that meaning is conveyed through interpretation of literature composed by unreliable witnesses. Such as the books of the Bible, for instance.
