The first barrier and its related obstructions have considerable importance, and illustrate the linking of incompleteness (through their shutting-out power) with the development which results from their dissolution. In the second part of the book, we are dealing with Gerry's personal barriers primarily. In brief, his problem arose because he was unguarded (had no helping barrier) when Alicia was triggered by the phrase "Baby is three" into mentally reliving her experience with Lone three years before, at which time her own physical barrier (literally her hymen) had been broken; the resulting shock caused Gerry to develop his occlusion-barrier. (Indeed, there is a specific reference to "that 'Baby is three' barrier," [p. 143] by Gerry to Stern.) Lone's breaking of Alicia's barrier was a reward to her for reading books and furnishing him with information he wanted. Gerry's consequent occlusion prevented him from using his telepathic powers until the barrier was broken down with Stern's aid. (Miss Kew herself represents a barrier: not only was she the cause of Gerry's occlusion, but she prevents the gestalt from bleshing--even tries to break it up by sending Baby away.) However, his incompleteness in the sense of lacking "morality" leads to the erection of a mental barrier in terms of his loneliness and difference from mankind. Finally, after Hip overcomes his Gerry-induced occlusion/barrier, it is possible to break down Gerry's barrier to "morality" and, in a different sense, the barrier between the Gerry-gestalt and the über-gestalt (which had been one of incompleteness).

A distinct, but related complex of incidents are those relating to what we may call faulty assumptions, which may be looked upon as barriers between the maker of the assumption and reality. These, too, must be overcome before the final obviation of incompleteness can occur. Note Mr. Kew's mistaken notions of the good and evil of the world, for one. Further, the Prodds think Lone has suffered amnesia like Cousin Grace, that he is not (emphatically stated by Mrs. Prodd after looking at his eyes) an idiot, and that (for a time) he is their child. Gerry initially thinks all there is to the world is hate; Hip expects to find his goal in the army; Wilma thinks happiness comes in trousers. Or consider Lone himself. When he starts thinking at all, he first believes himself utterly alone ... and meets Janie, the twins, and eventually Baby. Then, there is his first notion of reality:

He had believed that Prodd was his only contact with anything outside himself and that the children were merely fellow occupants of a slag dump at the edge of mankind. The loss of Prodd--and he knew with unshakable certainty that he would never see the old man again--was the loss of life itself. At the very least, it was the loss of everything conscious, directed, cooperative; everything above and beyond what a vegetable could do by way of living. [p. 74]

Two pages later he is exclaiming, "And we'll grow, Baby. We just got born!", which is a correction to the one, and in itself another, mistake. For as Baby says, through Janie, they won't grow because the thing they are is an idiot. Later, Stern commences therapy (after thinking Gerry was a kid who had wandered in off the street) by refuting various "thumbnail sketches" of psychiatry. He ends with the mistaken notion that all Gerry needs is morality--mistaken because at the very end of the book the über-gestalt explains that the thing which caused completion was something more than ethics, which in turn are something more than morality. Even Gerry's assumption that he has no morality is false, for Lone had rebuked him for taking a bright yellow pen, and he had himself refrained from killing Stern--thinking (or rationalizing) that it was more "amusing" to let him live. Finally, Hip--for all his own mistaken assumptions about "Thompson" (the "Air Force psychiatrist" who was really Gerry), Janie's intentions, and his father's worth--manages to correct Janie's (and the Gerry-gestalt's) mistaken assumption that they're not human, and that humanity's rules don't apply to them.

Linked in turn to the faulty assumptions are those factors of the work which involve confusion or muddling of identity. They may be further considered as barriers between the individual and the world. Already noted in a different context is the fact that the Idiot is nameless for some time. Who "Jack" (the son they had lost) is to the Prodds is not revealed immediately, nor are the roles of Gerry and Hip. Janie has no last name when she is introduced. Later she is to call herself Janie Gerard--Gerard, Gerry's name because she is part of the Gerry-gestalt; this identify is slammed into the reader's attention when the sheriff who is keeping Hip mistakes the name twice. And it is just such a muddling, merging, and confusing of identities which is the mechanism of the formation of the gestalt organism, which in some undefinable but natural way is "I". Getting back to Gerry as "individual," he starts his interview with Stern by refusing to reveal his identity (for which, in another sense, he is actually looking). Stern reminds him of Lone. When he returns to consciousness after breaking through the occlusion it is on "two distinct levels" (as 11 years old and in shock from the ego transference, and as 15 and on Stern's couch), and in the unconscious state he had been Alicia Kew. He killed her because of another identity confusion; which is also linked here to the occlusion/barrier:

You talk about occlusions! I couldn't get past the 'Baby is three' thing because in it lay the clues to what I really am. I couldn't find that out because I was afraid to remember that I was two things--Miss Kew's little boy and something a hell of a lot bigger. I couldn't be both, and I wouldn't release either one. [p. 143]

Notice also the typical incomplete, stepwise revelation of facts. In the third part, the entire story revolves around the clarification of identity: Hip doesn't know who he is, who Janie is, who "Thompson" is; and meanwhile Gerry has regressed to a childish state, having lost his sense of identity. Also, on an overall basis there is a certain confusion for the reader resulting from the shifts in the "identity" of the narrator: Part One is in the third person with Lone as major character in terms of quantity of description at least; Part Two is in the first person, with Gerry as narrator; Part Three is back to the third person, and Hip is the "major" character. The finishing touch is the confusion as to whether the Gerry-gestalt is an individual unit or a segment of the larger "unit," and of course the resolution of the misconceptions as to what humanity (or mankind) is.

Thus far we have seen three interrelated groups of incidents and images all of which are also related to the theme of incompleteness. Another group can be discovered by noting a peculiar common pattern to the family relationships and the natures of the parents in the book. The families are incomplete, for the most part, and the parents are bad. Mrs. Kew had died, Mr. Kew is insane; the Prodds don't have Jack, but they drive Lone out preparing for him--thus betraying their position as surrogate parents to Lone; Wilma has no husband, she is adulterous and stupid and soon drives Janie out; Hip's mother is never mentioned, his father disowns him after trying to crush his technical talents in favor of medicine; Gerry has no parents, his surrogate family of the orphanage drives him out with its cruelty and viciousness. The reactions are Alicia's rather pathological desire for a family (she sent Baby away because she couldn't pretend he was her child), Gerry's submission to Lone and need to consult Stern (both men being surrogate parents, and even being confused for one another by Gerry), and Hip's great desire to impress his Colonel and his repeated thinking of himself as "ROTC boy" (the Colonel obviously having been taken as "father" to replace the hated doctor). Familial incompleteness is a causal agent, then; it stimulates change, and change leads to progress. At the end of it all is the realization that mankind is the parent of the gestalt, and the resulting "good" progress for the race as a whole which is fostered by a "complete" family.

Incompleteness is usually a passive thing: an idiot remains an idiot in the real world, and a body lacking a part cannot grow it or absorb it from its environment. In More Than Human, though, there are active drives and "natural" urges which combat incompletenesses and promote development. The greatest number of them act on Lone, for he is an idiot and needs the most prodding. He goes to Evelyn in response to a call he feels:

Without analysis, he was aware of the bursting within him of an encysted need ... And bursting so, it flung a thread across his internal gulf, linking his alive and independent core to the half-dead animal around it. It was a sending straight to what was human in him, received by an instrument which, up to now, had accepted only the incomprehensible radiations of the new-born, and so had been ignored. [pp. 9-10]

To become more than human, one must first become human. Lone's drive brings him up against the barrier around the Kew place, and forces him to find a way through it. He feels a similar call from Janie and the twins, but is disappointed when he discovers it is only the sending of some hungry children. Their hunger, another natural drive, brings them to him, though. And he feeds them and takes them in because he recalls Mrs. Prodd's hospitality ("Now you set right down and have some breakfast") and wishes to mimic it. By so doing, he becomes not only more "human," but more nearly complete, for he accepts the kids. It is, finally, his urge to know what he is and what he belongs to (which urge is shared by every kind of people, according to Baby) that leads him to the discovery of "his" gestalt nature.

Hip was driven from his father because of his curiosity; Gerry was driven from the orphanage by the hate which he had come to think of as natural. Gerry's reason for killing Alicia Kew is to ensure the survival of the gestalt. When Gerry remembers Lone through Alicia's thoughts, Lone mentions another natural drive, "All I know is I got to do what I'm doing like a bird's got to nest when it's time." (p. 134) That is Lone's description of why he stays in the woods, waiting to complete himself. Later, when Miss Kew asks him, "What made you start doing this?" after Lone tells her about the gestalt, he answers "What made you start growing hair in your armpits? ... You don't figure a thing like that. It just happens." (p. 138)

Stern asks Gerry, after he had explained the gestalt organism, "What now?" Gerry replies, "We'll just do what comes naturally." (p. 144) When Gerry implants a drive in Hip (the sickness compulsion, and attendant occlusion of memory), he is himself nearly destroyed as a result. Unnatural drives are not good. On the other hand, Hip's compulsion to prove himself right about the anti-gravity device, though motivated by pride perhaps, is a natural drive, which finally leads to the completion of the Gerry-gestalt. Natural drives are both, good and functional.

The drives lead to development, or progress. Structurally, they may be looked on as the link between the theme of incompleteness and a theme of development, of progress toward the final completion. Also, in the context built up in the book, natural drives combat incompletenesses on the level of content or incidents. Barriers must be overcome, by penetration or circumvention. Identity must be found. Faulty assumptions must be corrected; the incomplete ones must be expanded, just as Hip's "world" expands ("It's as if my whole world, everywhere I lived, was once in a little place inside my head, so deep I could't see out. And then you made it as big as a room and then as big as a town ..." p. 172, to Janie). The formal parallel is the final completion of "factual" revelations which takes place in Part Three.

There are many incidents which depict development. For instance, the development of Lone--his "humanization." He develops volition at the wall around the Kew place. He develops the power of communication with Prodd, both telepathically and verbally. After leaving the Prodds, he becomes aware of time for the first time. Because the Prodds wanted him to leave, he develops the human trait of self-pity; he berates himself for his lonliness. He parallels the development of man by becoming a tool-using animal when he borrows an ax from Prodd to build himself a shelter. He begins the comtemplative thought which caused Gerry to remember him later as "like always, walking along, thinking, thinking." In short, as he realizes, "The Prodds were one thing, and when they took him in they became something else; he knew it now. And then when he was by himself he was one thing; but taking in those kids he was something else." (p. 67) In Lone as a person we see the process of development, the process of becoming, the process of life.

However, the final development of Lone as an individual is not the final development of his gestalt organism. When he says to Baby "We'll grow!" Baby replies, through Janie, "He says not on your life. He says not with a head like that. We can do practically anything but we most likely won't. He says we're a thing, all right, but the thing is an idiot." (p. 76) When Lone dies, a new head takes over; and the acquisition of Gerry as head is the second step in the development of the gestalt. Gerry's "personal" development requires the catalyst of Hip, though, for the third stage of the gestalt's development to proceed to completion. Gerry must kill Miss Kew in the meantime to remove the threat to his potential development; he has also become aware of himself as a biological development, employing metaphors involving Neanderthal and Peking man in the course of his personal "development" (actually a cure, a return to normal from abnormal) with Stern.

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©2003 Michael A. Padlipsky. All rights reserved.