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Odds and the End

This chapter ties up many of the themes of the book. It looks back to the discussions of luck by discussing the various uses of ‘odd’ or ‘odds’ in the book, where it especially figures outside the luck chapters in the chapter on the messenger as the third party, the odd man. This leads to a discussion of the collocation of ‘odds and ends’ and then to three stories that are odds and ends. The first deals with two six-year-old girls on their first day of school who engage in a verbal fight to the death that rather brilliantly deals with Austin’s performatives better than most academic literature. The second is a tale of the author as a father to a woebegone nine-year-old son who discerned that day that life has no point as he sobbed uncontrollably, which leads to a brief discussion of Gloucester in Lear and a powerful Middle English lyric and the pointlessness of everything. The third story is short and is a tale of what the author is left to at his end: rereading and being discovered by his daughter to be both knave and fool.