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The Ambassadors
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 October 2023
Chapter 3 examines what it means to break a promise, and how doing so might be more virtuous than keeping it. Various promises are broken in The Ambassadors, although ironically their not being kept makes no difference, since what had been promised happens anyway. The chapter focuses on this odd paradox as a means of solving the central puzzle of the novel: Strether’s belief at the end of his summer in Paris that he has remained “just the same for himself on all essential points as he had ever been” (XXII, 284) while undergoing a profound transformation. As I see it, Strether’s developing sense of morality is a creative force, an act of the imagination.
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