The Young Vagrant

This document is an extract from a novel entitled Therapy, written by the English author David Lodge and published in 1995.

General presentation.

The scene takes place in a building of the West End of London, in contemporary London.

The narrator is a man who lives in this building. He must be a middle-aged man since he keeps referring to the other character as “young”. He lives in a comfortable flat (equipped with a video entryphone) and seems to be quite proud to live in London’s West End (an exclusive district) so he must belong to the upper middle-class. There is another character who is a long-haired young man with a pointed, foxy face, who has decided to spend the night in the narrator’s porch. The narrator also hints that even though he is homeless, he is rather well-dressed and his sleeping bag seems to be quite comfortable.

Organisation of the text.

The text can be divided into three parts:

- from line 1 to line 12, the narrator tells us how he came to discover the young man and describes him;

- from line 13 to line 27, he describes his own feelings in front of this scene;

- from line 28 to the end, he gives a more general reflexion about what he considers as a new type of homeless persons.

Part 1.

The narrator explains that he likes to use his video entryphone to have a look at the people walking in the street, and that is how he discovered the young man sleeping in his porch. We can say that he did not expect to see a young man sleeping in his porch: he uses the phrase blow me to express his surprise. Indeed, Even though the narrator hints that it is the sort of thing that could have happened, he says that he has never seen anyone there before because the porch is too small (l. 8-9). However, this detail did not seem to bother the young man since he was sitting up instead of lying down.

Part 2.

The narrator says that he was startled and furious because the young man would be in the way if residents wanted to get into or out of the building. Besides he believes that having a tramp lying in the entrance gives a bad image of the building: It would be impossible to go in or out without stepping over him. (l. 14) … it lowered the tone of the property to have him camped there. (l. 16)

That is why he tried to find a solution to solve the problem, but no solution he could think of appeared possible. First of all, the narrator thought of going down to tell the young vagrant to move on, but he was in his pyjamas and did not feel like putting his clothes on again. Then he thought of calling the police but quickly gave up the idea, knowing that the police would have more important matters to deal with. Finally he wished he could get rid of the young man by speaking to him through his entryphone and scare him away but as it had no loudspeaker he knew it was a mere fantasy.

Part 3.

Finally, the narrator explains that the young man seems to belong to a new category of vagrants who, according to him, have

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