Fifth Business 317reflect rationally on this incident; he cannot dismiss
the irrational fears, nor can he know how to cope
with the power differential in the village. As we see
later in the novel, his taking on this responsibility
is viewed not as praiseworthy but as pathological.
Not only can Dunstan not differentiate between
the culpability of the agent—the person who threw
the snowball—and that of himself as intended vic-
tim, who dodged it out of an instinct for his own
personal safety, but he also does not consider the
fact that he could not have known of the rock in its
center. After all, an ordinary snowball most probably
would not have injured anyone.
Dunstan’s lonely and ill-advised assumption
of the entire burden of responsibility at such a
young age leads to a pattern of taking on other
people’s burdens for the rest of his life and to a life
of pathetic isolation until a female con artist to
whom he tells his life story challenges his early deci-
sion. Percy eventually pays for his act, but Davies’s
novel makes it clear that Mrs. Dempster and Dun-
stan are not simply the bully’s victims but victims
of a culture that stood more for self-righteousness
than for virtue.
Susan R. Bowers
spirituality in Fifth Business
For Dunstan Ramsay, the protagonist of Fifth Busi-
ness, spirituality must wage war with religion,
a battle that consumes most of his life, from the
moment when, as a 10-year-old, he assumes respon-
sibility for a woman’s debilitating head injury from a
snowball intended for him until an unlikely teacher
helps him to see the truth of who he is.
For the residents of Dunstan’s tiny rural Cana-
dian village, religion is marked more by rules, prohi-
bitions, and the fear of damnation than by anything
else. As Dunstan observes,”I was a Presbyterian
child, and I knew a good deal about damnation.” In
particular, Christian grace is in short supply, as Dun-
stan discovers when Mary Dempster, the woman he
befriends because he feels responsible for her injury,
violates the town’s rigid moral codes. Her husband,
the local Baptist minister, ties her to a chair to keep
her indoors, and the townspeople, including Dun-
stan’s mother, shun her.
Dunstan’s mother forbids him from visiting
Mary Dempster, but even as a child, he understands
that to comply with her order “would be the end of
anything that was good in me.” The truth is that
although Dunstan becomes Mary’s self-appointed
guardian out of a mistaken sense of culpability,
the kindnesses he extends to her initiate a lifelong
practice of the compassion that is at the heart of
genuine spirituality. Nor is his kindness unrewarded:
He discovers early on that, unlike his supposed
friendship with Percy Staunton (who had thrown
the calamitous snowball), a genuine friendship yields
mutual benefit. Even though his befriending of the
Dempster family isolates him from his peers and
alienates him from his family, Dunstan is able to
find comfort in his relationship with Mary, whom
he “regarded... as my greatest friend, and the secret
league between us as the tap-root that fed my life.”
Not unlike the Bible’s Mary Magdalene, the
disgraced Mary Dempster displays a powerful,
clarifying spirituality evident to Dunstan even as a
young boy. He comes to see that even though she is
imprisoned in her house and despised by the village,
she feels neither disgraced nor humiliated, but lives
“in a world of trust that had nothing of the stricken,
lifeless, unreal quality of religion about it.” He senses
that she “lived by a light that arose from within.”
Unlike her husband—of whom Dunstan realizes
many years later, “He was a parson, of course, but at
root he was a frightened farmer lad”—Mary has no
fear. Dunstan even accords her supernatural powers.
He believes that Mrs. Dempster brings his brother
back from death, and when he is wounded in World
War I, he sees her face in a statue of the Virgin.
Dunstan’s relationship with Mary Dempster—
which continues until her death when he himself is
in late middle age—affords him a deep appreciation
of beauty and courage of singularity, which he learns
from her example. At the very beginning of the
novel, we learn that his village lacked “an aesthetic
sense.” Thus, Mary’s sense of wonder at the natural
world and delight in just being alive contribute
to Dunstan’s emerging spirituality. However, it is
her ability to be comfortable in herself even while
estranged from others—what Dunstan calls her
“breadth of outlook and a clarity of vision that were
strange and wonderful”—that may be her greatest