A quick search turned up mostly recipe threads and I have no idea how to turn off preview.
I just finished the aforementioned novel and was a little confused by the ending. All through the novel we’re treated to the rascal or bastard Sebastian, depending on how you view him, and his misadventures. He, and we as readers, are waiting for some big climax through most of the novel. Presumably, it’ll be his results as a graduating law student. It turns out to be …
***spoiler alert ***
… his father’s death. The anti-climax is that he will not receive the large inheritance he has been anticipating. And, while he has suffered a blow because of it, he doesn’t seem to have changed a bit as the novel ends. So what was the point?
At the end, he gets visibly ill in the cab with the ostentatious American, Cabot, and is “vomited” from the cab in the financial district. Presumably, this is an indictment against the crass commercialism of Americans and his realization of it. (And the whole novel has been and indictment of the corruption of European life in a different way.) Then he is brought back to Mary, whom he proceeds to violently savage. He doesn’t seem to have changed at all.
Does the protagonist/anti-hero Sebastian Dangerfield go through any transformation at all? He just seems to continue on in the same vile way that the whole preceding novel has progressed. He’ll undoubtably be unfaithful and violent towards Mary as he was to his first wife. I don’t get it.
And is there any significance to the fact that the novel ends on Christmas Eve/Christmas Morning and he is returning to “Mary?”