Comment on the following passage : p.12 l.12 – p.14 l.14 (document en anglais)

In this passage, the narrator looks at a picture of Catherine (when she was younger), and he calls up memories. We can see a free indirect speech p.12 l.16: “Catherine, Catherine, he said as he looked at the picture of her in their garden.” Moreover, we see that there are rhetorical questions, because he asks to himself how would have been his life if she had stayed with him p.12 l.21-22: “But how could he have borne that? How could he have kept her when she was pregnant with another man’s child?”.

But the thing which is the most important and the more blatant is the opposition of the decription of Catherine and the description of the narrator, because the description of Catherine is very pejorative, she is described like a very old person, p.12 l.28-32: “She would be old, fat perhaps, arthritic perhaps, those firm cheeks fallen into jowls, those eyes sunk in folds of skin, that white column of a neck become a bundle of strings, that glossy chestnut hair bush of grey. No man would want her nom”.