At The Pitt Rivers Summary

At The Pitt Rivers
While “At The Pitt Rivers” may center around the development and progress of a couple, it also speaks to the influence that couple had on the narrator. Although the narrator may seem like just another pair of judgemental eyes, they (the gender of the narrator is never actually revealed--therefore could be referred as “they”) are looking at this couple very anthropologically. The narrator notices all the fine details of the way that they interacted: “They stood there looking at each other, not talking anymore, and I realised I hadn’t made a mistake after all. Absolutely not. They didn’t touch each other, they just stood and looked; it seemed like ages” (Lively 27). They noticed all the little details, all the tiny hints
that the couple had feelings without their physical contact. They could see that there was love just by the looks on the people’s faces, through the smallest of outlets. This is evident when the narrator observes that “She sat there with her hands in her lap, watching the door, and radiating away so that in a peculiar fashion it made you feel good just to look at her, a bit like you were joining in how she felt” (Lively 25). The narrator goes on to talk about how they recognize this as a sign of love. The narrator acts as an anthropologist in the way that they study how the couple acts both together and separate from each-other. Since the narrator takes a more scientific perspective on the way they see the couple, they prove they are not just another set of prying eyes. Because the narrator has had such few and not-very-meaningful relationships, they realize because of the couple they are “observing” that they know very little about love.
For instance, because they are noticing the love, they put their own relationships under a microscope: “The first time was with a girl in my class at school and I suppose it was a bit of a trial run, really, I mean I’m not altogether sure how much I was feeling it but it seemed quite important when it was going on” (Lively 25). When reading this passage in your head, you can almost sense the doubt and unsureness. Also, there is the fact that the narrator then take themselves into perspective: “I’m not that good-looking myself, only a B+” (Lively 25). This passage reveals that they may be thinking of the love the couple that they are watching invalidates all the love that they have had or may ever have. Until the narrator of this story sees the couple the story is centered around, they believe they know what love is but, the couple makes them second guess if they have really ever experienced it
before. While the narrator seemed to be a good enough writer before they witnessed the couple, I believe that they will become an even greater one for having witnessed what they did.
First of all, the narrator themself criticizes the quality of their work before having witnessed the couple in love: “Sometimes I feel I’m getting somewhere with this poetry, and other times it looks to me pretty awful” (Lively 27). The narrator is acknowledging that their work isn’t perfect and that it is missing something. After the narrator has witnessed the story that has unfolded before them they decide that their poetry doesn’t do any justice to their topic: “I never did go on with that poem. I tore it up, as far as it had got; I wasn’t so sure about that conversation, that there could even be one, or not like I’d been imagining, anyway” (Lively 31). Now, the author has seen that maybe they don’t know what they’re doing. They recognize that their work is faulty, the new information that they have learned from the couple most likely to blame. Where the narrator may have already been a great poet, the experiences they have witnessed have changed the way they perceive things and perhaps even made them a better
poet. Since this story is so heavily centered around this story of a couple, the couple in question also has a strong influence on the story’s progression.