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Further details as to how Mr Verloc’s operations work: goods are sold far above their market value (to dissuade real customers from shopping there), and then used to smuggle secret materials, which can be deposited and picked up in seemingly innocuous packages.

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We have already been made to suspect that the entire store is a front for some nefarious and illegal activity; Conrad all but confirms that here, suggesting that the “sales” are phony, and that secret materials are being smuggled in these ostensible purchases.

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Since, of course, his “business” is not actually selling his wares to customers.

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Again, having aroused the reader’s suspicions about Mr Verloc, Conrad feels free to pile on additional details, knowing that the reader will fill in the blanks. Here, the reader instantly appreciates that the true purpose of this abnormally loud bell is to warn those inside the store of a possible intruder.

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Nearly every detail Conrad gives us about the customers arouses suspicion — they behave as if trying to avoid surveillance, and hardly seem to have enough disposable income to warrant spending it on useless knickknacks in this mostly useless store.

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Conrad has taught us to be suspicious of Mr Verloc and his business by introducing jarring details at the end of each of the first two paragraphs. At the end of the first, we learn that the business that has called him away from the shop is a pretext. At the end of the second, we hear that the shop door is left “suspiciously” ajar at night.

We are thus trained to fill in the blank with the last sentence of the third paragraph — to appreciate that the gas lights are turned low neither for economy nor for the customers, but to obscure the nefarious business going on inside.

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There is an odor of illicit sex that hangs around the store — the “more or less undressed dancing girls”, and the pornographic novels.

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The first sentence of the novel is perfectly anodyne — a shopkeeper goes out, leaving his brother-in-law in charge. But the second sentence adds a sinister note. The “business” that has called Mr Verloc away is a sham, a pretext, and his brother-in-law is not at all capable of looking after the shop, and is being (secretly) controlled by his wife.

Thus the theme of secrecy is introduced in the first paragraph.

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Our second indication that something is amiss — that Mr Verloc’s business is not entirely benign.

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Again, we understand that Manoa will not be able to procure actual liberty for Samson, merely its illegitimate counterfeit, the loosening of his chains. The Philistines will continue to think of Samson as bound to serve them at their pleasure.

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