After John’s death, the narrative shifts from the tension and anticipation of the murder to the characters’ response, building toward Trudy and Claude’s climactic confrontation with the police. Two clear shifts occur within the characters and their motivations following John’s death. First, the focus of the narrator’s contemplation shifts from his own sense of complicity in the act to his feelings over his mother’s involvement. Although he still questions what role he played and how he will respond, he now begins to question who deserves to be punished for the crime. Second, Trudy and Claude’s relationship begins to fracture after their act, largely as a result of their different reactions to it. While Trudy is upset at having killed someone, especially the man she once loved, Claude reacts with cold detachment, justifying the murder and dismissing Trudy’s feelings.

The narrator’s first fully formed dream is a pivotal moment in his arc. In the dream, he travels freely through landscapes and cities, as “a formless mass or mess of wavering, ill-lit shapes, people and places dissolving, indistinct voices in vaulted spaces singing or speaking,” giving him “a sense of having left someone or something behind” (104). This dream contrasts sharply with the narrator’s physical confinement inside the womb. While his body remains restricted, forced to deal with the fallout of his father’s death, his mind is capable of wandering through spaces that he has never actually seen. At the same time, the narrator’s sense of having committed a “betrayal of duty or love” highlights the impossibility of disentangling his life from the murder that has occurred (104); even if he were not physically confined, his life would still be defined by this event in a way that highlights The Limits of Knowledge and Power. Likewise, the dream’s final moments, the bells that toll to signal death, emphasize the finality of John’s death and its impact on the narrator.

The ambiguous meeting that precedes the tolling bell complicates this point. The unnamed figure the narrator encounters, who has “a tale he has in mind, something he has written or [the narrator has], and wants an opinion, or to give one, a correction a point of fact” (105), can be interpreted as John; given the various anachronistic details in the dream, it may also be a reference to Shakespeare himself. Either way, the uncertainty about who is writing the story is significant; if John or Shakespeare is, the narrator is not in control of his life’s narrative, but the novel holds out the possibility that the narrator is himself the writer. The presence of writing also adds nuance to the motif of poetry, suggesting that the written word does have power, however ineffectual John might have seemed to the narrator.

Meanwhile, Trudy’s actions in this section underscore the theme of The Problem of Ethical Judgment and Action. The arrival of the police officers marks the first moment when the consequences of the murder become clear, forcing Trudy to play the grieving widow. Yet her performance of shock and sorrow is not wholly feigned; in the aftermath, the narrator detects the first signs of uncertainty and regret, which her argument with Claude further underscores. This complexity—regret coexisting with self-preservation—complicates the narrator’s already complicated feelings for her. He views her remorse as genuine but is also not above highlighting her hypocrisy and self-deception, as when he sardonically remarks, “Her status as a murderer is a fact, an item in the world outside herself. But that’s old thinking. […] [S]he feels blameless and therefore is—almost” (146). His sarcasm indicates uncertainty about whether Trudy’s sense of the murder as something she never really intended makes her more culpable or less.

Regardless, Trudy’s second thoughts lead to conflict with Claude that exposes the deeper tensions within their relationship. Claude viciously reminds Trudy that she played an active role in the murder, noting, “[T]he next morning who was that, proposing a toast to love, coaxing the man who shaped her life to raise a cup of venom? Surely not my brother’s loving wife” (120). Claude’s refusal to let Trudy distance herself from responsibility reveals that the partnership that once united them in secret plotting is now beginning to fracture under the pressure of reality, evoking the theme of The Corrupting Influence of Greed and Desire. Now that wealth and a life together are in their grasp, unresolved questions about guilt and loyalty remain.