The Man who Walked Through Walls

http://www.stresscafe.com/translations/pm/index.htm

To quick summarize this story, a gentleman named Dutilleul gains the ability to move through walls. Thinking that it was a disease, he visits a doctor who gives him pills to take to bring him back to normal. After taking some, Dutilleul feels nothing and is still able to walk through walls. Since Dutilleul was a simple man who lived a simple life, he never had any interest to use this ability. However, after he gets a new boss who constantly yells at him, he decides to terrorize him with his ability by popping his head into his room. After about two weeks, his boss is sent to the sanitarium.

After getting rid of his new boss, Dutilleul gets this urge to test the limits of his ability. He does this by robbing a bank. He goes by the alias, Lone Wolf, and begins to gain prestige among the public. To prove to his colleagues that he was the Lone Wolf, he lets himself get arrested. He then continuously escapes prison time after time and lets himself get caught each time. During the last arrest , the warden shouts threats and insults him. With his pride wounded, Dutilleul escapes again the following night and decides not to return.

Next, he shaves off his goatee and disguises himself so that he would not be recognized in public. He meets a beautiful lady who is married to a jealous man. He learns that the beautiful lady is locked up in her room every night when he goes to work. Dutilleul uses his ability to move through walls to visit her in her room and has an affair with her. The day after, Dutilleul get a headache so he takes some pills next to his bed. After having an affair with the beautiful lady the second time around, he tries to escape. However, he gets stuck in the walls. Then he remembers the pills that he took were the pills that would get rid of his ability to move through walls. He remains in between the walls helplessly.

The message behind this story is that pride can be a very dangerous feeling. In this story, Dutilleul begins to be proud of his ability to pass through walls after getting his boss to leave the job. This probably gave him the thought that his ability to walk through walls could be used to benefit himself even more. Because of this pride, he decides to try to impress his own colleagues by letting himself get arrested during a robbery. It's this pride that leads him to his eventual downfall when he gets stuck in between the walls.

This story leads us to see that some people who have the power to do as they please may attempt to push their limits until they find that line that they can't cross. However, the unfortunate thing is that we don't know where that line is. Therefore, we could end up crossing that line before we even know it and it could cost us everything. Dutilleul thought he was unstoppable. Little did he know that all it took was some pills to make him stoppable.

Another point we can see is that power can be very addicting once you're exposed to it. At the beginning of the story, Dutilleul doesn't seem interested in using his abilities. In fact, he continues to use his key to unlock the door to his house instead of just walking through the walls. However, when he uses his abilities to scare his boss, he finds out that his ability is much more than it seems. In relation to ourselves, procrastination can be taken into consideration. Assuming that a student has a habit of procrastinating, that student may keep procrastinating if he or she is satisfied with the grade that he or she gets when the procrastinated assignment is graded. On the other hand, if the student fails the procrastinated assignment, he or she may consider doing the next assignment to better his or her grade.