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We have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that is unique in all our acts. But it isn't true. We perceive this when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, we are as it were, suspended, caught up in the air on a kind of hook. We perceive that all of us was not in that act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action alone, as if all our existence were summed up in that one deed.

Once again stepping from his role to sermonize, the Father muses on the act that defines him as a Character in Act I. This act comes from the scene around which it crystallizes: the inadvertent sexual encounter between the Father and Step-Daughter in the back room of Madame Pace's shop that precipitates the encounter and ruin of the two families. Here, the spectator receives it in exposition, and the Father offers an existentialist interpretation of its nature. For him, its tragedy inheres in man's belief in his unitary being. He only perceives this once caught in an act, so to speak, that determines him entirely. Judged by another, he appears to himself in alienated form, suspended in a reality that he should have known. The Step-Daughter should not have seen the Father in Pace's room; he should not have become real to her. The Father's suspension as pervert simultaneously fixes him as a Character.

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