User:Castaigne

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[edit] A Summary

Hildred Castaigne (Hildred de Calvadoss Castaigne) is the primary chatacter of The Repairer of Reputations, both protagonist and narrator, albeit it unreliably. He begins the story telling us about the world of alternate 1920s, which is either as possible future as viewed in 1895, when the story was first published, or is the product of an unstable mind still living in 1895. Potentially it is contains elements of both. Hildred is someone who seems to be quite arrogant, proud, and easy to provoke. We learn quite early on, after he has accounted for the details of recent events on a larger scale, the fact that he has had an accident, a fall from a horse, which led to him being diagnosed as mentally ill, a state from which he has supposedly recovered, though he denies he was ever ill at all. In fact this denial is just one small facet of the madness that envelops him and this story. Another is that, during the period of his recovery, Hildred read The King In Yellow. He see that his perceptions do not marry up with those of other people he encounters, which must lead us to doubt the accuracy of the world he describes. We learn that before his accident Hildred was "fond of fishing... You used to be fond of everything, athletics, yachting, shooting, riding..." but now he'd rather study. At the end of this initial story he is being dragged away by the police. An editor's note at the end of the story tells us: "Mr. Castaigne died yesterday in the Asylum for Criminal Insane."

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