'M is unable to form functional relationships with others.' Do you agree?

‘M is unable to form functional relationships with others.’ Do you agree?

M places his professionalism above his relationships. This is seen as dysfunctional, to want people only to take him further in his hunt, his work. He sees relationships only as prey and predator like in his hunt. He concentrated fully on the hunt, taking it into every aspect of his life, eliminating faults leading to imprecision. To be a hunter was his life.

It is M’s choice not to form functional relationships with others. He feels he is in control of his life. M’s obsession with the hunt is initially single-minded to the extent that it overshadows anything else. He used Jacinta only for sexual gratification and wants to keep all relationship in the way he did with theirs: to prey upon people to make a profit of some kind. M wanted to be in control of his feelings toward other people. Only, M found that he was no longer the master of his emotions, finding himself attached to the Armstrong family, in particular, Bike – the boy who counts.

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He sees in people what he has to gain from them and them from him; he does not act out of kindness but acts only out of essential. It is not normal for a person, such as M, to place their profession above companionship. M has a sense of himself carrying on a tradition, the tradition of hunt, therefore placing even more significance in his work. ‘He does not like it, this imprecision, he does not like it at all.’ (p. 8) M disciplines himself not to form functional relationships for fear of them jeopardising his professionalism. ”Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.” * M placed all his joy in his work for he had to complete his mission with apt perfection. “One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”** M felt his work was of grave importance, disallowing him to be distracted by relationships and this made himself dysfunctional.

We say that M is dysfunctional because we don’t consider his choice of action as normal but it is his normality. ‘The escarpment beckons. Soon, he thinks, soon he’ll be there. He wishes he was up there now, up where it is calm and pure, with space enough for a man to think.’ (p. 133) He thinks he finds comfort in his solitude, like many people would find comfort among their friends and family. Nonetheless, he states in Part Two, ‘if a man’s life were an island it would be uninhabitable.’ (p. 139) M has this deep longing for companionship that he overcomes in order to fulfil his task. “I count him braver who overcomes his desires… for the hardest victory is over self.”*

“Different men seek after happiness in different ways and by different means, and so make for themselves different modes of life and forms of government.”* M thought he found his happiness in his work, in professionalism, thus creating a set of boundaries to keep him from failing. Only he finds that these boundaries became those that stopped him from finding happiness. M’s life was as a hunter.

*Aristotle **Bertrand Russel