"She did not admire him any more than she had. It was merely that she considered him the Lesser of two evils"
About this Quote
Burroughs delivers a romantic anti-climax with the crispness of a knife: no swelling conversion, no sudden respect, just a cold recalibration of risk. "She did not admire him" lands like a slammed door on the reader's expectation that proximity will breed affection. Then comes the pivot - "merely" - a single word that shrinks the emotional stakes on purpose. This isn’t love, or even esteem; it’s triage.
The line works because it exposes how often narrative chemistry is really narrative convenience. Adventure fiction, the mode Burroughs helped popularize, thrives on forced alliances: captivity, war, wilderness. Under pressure, characters pair up not because they’ve discovered each other’s souls, but because the alternative is worse. Burroughs lets that pragmatic calculus show. The phrase "Lesser of two evils" is blunt, almost legalistic, importing moral accounting into what readers are trained to experience as romance or hero-worship. It punctures the heroic aura without fully dismantling it: he’s still useful, still preferable, still in the running - just not in the way ego would like.
The subtext is also gendered and strategic. She’s making a choice that preserves agency inside constraint, refusing to reward male competence with automatic admiration. In a genre that often launders domination into destiny, this sentence insists on something more skeptical: survival can look like partnership, and partnership can be nothing more flattering than choosing the option that harms you least.
The line works because it exposes how often narrative chemistry is really narrative convenience. Adventure fiction, the mode Burroughs helped popularize, thrives on forced alliances: captivity, war, wilderness. Under pressure, characters pair up not because they’ve discovered each other’s souls, but because the alternative is worse. Burroughs lets that pragmatic calculus show. The phrase "Lesser of two evils" is blunt, almost legalistic, importing moral accounting into what readers are trained to experience as romance or hero-worship. It punctures the heroic aura without fully dismantling it: he’s still useful, still preferable, still in the running - just not in the way ego would like.
The subtext is also gendered and strategic. She’s making a choice that preserves agency inside constraint, refusing to reward male competence with automatic admiration. In a genre that often launders domination into destiny, this sentence insists on something more skeptical: survival can look like partnership, and partnership can be nothing more flattering than choosing the option that harms you least.
Quote Details
| Topic | Relationship |
|---|
More Quotes by Edgar
Add to List
