Change in the narrator’s moral outlook intrinsically motivates him to adopt a new attitude—he ends his ordeal not by starving to death, but in self-exile—declaring that possession of a unique, individual moral code expands and evolves consciousness.
After a brief interlude, the narrator signs aboard Copégoro and sails out of Kristiania: “once out in the fjord [the narrator] straightened up, wet with fever and fatigue, looked in toward the shore and said goodbye for now to the city” (197).
The narrator negates the very impulse that drove him on in the first place, as his final act of self-destruction is to demolish the very foundations on which his social identity and literary aspirations were built.
He no longer shares the standards of
