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"At the end, at the end of the end of the city of Paris, there was, there was, was what?"

The Old Man asks the Old Woman this while trying to resume his story in Part Two. His repetitive phrasing itself leads to no finite end but continues delaying the destination at the "end of the end of the city of Paris." The three "of" prepositions that keep prolonging the sentence's conclusion, in addition to his stuttering "At the end" and "there was." While the Old Man's wife has a worse short-term memory, as she doses herself with salt each night so she will not remember his story, the Old Man's long-term memory blank means he has a similar problem accessing the past. This inaccessibility to the past means that his present life will be even more repetitive than its schedule suggests, since his mind can cycle around only events in the present. The Old Man's memory is not linear, stretching from his youth to his current age, but cyclical, blurring beginnings and endings. Hence, he does not know what lay at the end of Paris, just as he is unsure sometimes whether he is an old man, at the end of his own life, or an infantile orphan.

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