“Whoever wants to understand a symbol always takes risks.” (O. Wilde) Window in the Forest, 1909 Plot: A hunter gets lost. He comes across a forester's hut. Unnoticed, he looks out the window. And he sees the forester mocking the sandpiper. The hunter shoots the forester and moves away from this place. In my opinion, this is an extremely symbolic story. The window in the forest is a metaphor for the border between two worlds: the world of man, his persona, ego and other components, and the world of the unconscious, the one that Jung called collective. In Green's story, he could be called natural. Plain. Forest. Tree. The story begins with a man getting lost. But not in the forest, but...on the plain. This man is a hunter - a very interesting archetypal (in general, very Greene) image. Man with a gun. Man of the Forest. In front of him is an unfamiliar ominous plain. (Let us remember the “flat plain of life” and the “ghost of a man” from the story “Airship”, which was very close in time.) And then - a detailed detailed description of mental turmoil through an ominous picture of the surroundings on the plain. Thin trees (the image of a man on the plain) bow to the dark sky (the image of a deity). “The adult turned into a child,” writes Green. It is unclear where ... the monkeys come from in this landscape. A monkey is such a hairy, shaggy creature. Something like a devil. Then in The Pied Piper these monkeys will become rats. They rush about with the cries of the creature being killed. Monkeys are an image of some kind of virus, microbe, toxin with which the body is fighting. I. Zhuravlev, at a lecture on psychiatry at the Faculty of Moscow State University, provides remarkable data that the vision of such furry creatures indicates the presence of an organic (temporary) disorder, in contrast from the same schizophrenia. For example, a significant example is when experts were inclined to such a diagnosis based on the fact that a person described how he descended on furry balls. It was the image of something furry that became the key here. Green himself emphasizes this definition in the story: the hero (=writer) evoked “shaggy images of forest spirits.” We can say that Greene describes the psychological feeling of illness, severe physical ailment, a state of increased sensitivity and reactivity. Before us is a “land gripped by madness”, from which the sun is trying to hide. The hunter feels extreme hunger and cold. The proximity of the night frightens him. Voices are haunting. He wants to get out to a familiar place and get his bearings. He has a chosen direction, which he adheres to. Only after touching the trunk of a tree (this is a tree in the forest), the hero experiences the joy of meeting a friend who “came out to meet an exhausted comrade.” He instinctively strives for the forest in order to be in a better place in a storm. safe place. He belongs in the forest. Under protection. And from the ominous forester’s hut he goes into the forest again. “The passionless dense forest swallowed up a lonely man, and he kept walking, further and further towards the hungry, sleepless darkness, full of animals,” - this is how the story ends. Compare the ending of “The Glass Bead Game” (1942) by the very “Jungian” author Hermann Hesse (the ending of the entire novel and the last short story - the work of the Master of the Glass Bead Game, Joseph Knecht, with which the novel ends): the main character of the story, the Indian youth Dasa, also goes into the forest again - “He never left the forest again.” And into the forest he leaves the world, from people, from civilization. Is it a coincidence that the hero of Green’s first story, in which a forest appears before the reader (“The Case”), Balsen, meets his death at the hands of human beings, having already left the forest? Forest this is a world located between two passions: the flat plain of life (for Greene this is the image of boredom) and human habitation (the image of a technocratic, soulless civilization). The forest itself is just as scary, but compared to what it is between, this terrible forest full of animals turns out to be salvation. (I think that the forest is a symbol of culture for Green. Natural = positive for Green in culture. In Jungianism it is revelation in culture, through culture, with the help of culture.