"You can understand nothing about my life," he thinks, "because you, Marie-Therese, were damned from the start. You accepted this damnation and you live with it. You've blended into the mass, you've ironed out all the discords between the world and yourself, and made your nest there, you say bottom line, you talk about the image of a washing machine, you say I have positively bloomed, a women who talks about my business with that fervor is forever alien to me." He adds that "there's no parity between you and me," and that "we do not belong to the same caste."
This bitter narcissism is a quality shared by many of Reza's earlier characters as well. In Desolation, the curmudgeon hero rails against his son for committing the sin of happiness. In Hammerklavier, a woman writes off a man because he doesn't care for her necklace. In The Unexpected Man, the hero rants about everything from professional slights to his daughter's taste in men.
For that matter, Reza seems to have the same contempt for her heroes that her heroes have for others, and a similarly nihilistic outlook. Instead of probing the reasons for Adam's failures and disappointments, instead of examining the middle-aged despair that he and Marie-Therese actually share, she simply allows Adam to babble on self-indulgently, piling one complaint upon the next.
In the end, this is why Adam's long rant has little in common with Krapp's or Lear's existential rage at the world and everything in common with the late-night bloviating of an angry blogger, eager to whine and vent — full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.
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