One story, and three deaths

An intercalary chapter, opening Part Four. The narrator answers the child's question — what is the world's story about? — with a single answer: there is one story only, the net of good and evil that catches everyone, and when a man has brushed off the dust and chips of his life only the hard clean questions remain. Was it good, or was it evil? He retells Herodotus on Croesus, who asked Solon who the luckiest man alive was and was told, "How can I tell? You aren't dead yet." Then he measures three deaths in his own time: the century's richest man, who clawed his way up through the souls of men and spent years buying back the love he had forfeited, whose death was greeted with "Thank God that son of a bitch is dead"; a man smart as Satan who never grasped that a bribed man can only hate his briber; and a third who made frightened men brave, at whose death people wept in the streets. Underneath everything, men want to be good and want to be loved.

The book stops and states its thesis outright, having just spent two chapters on a man who put himself on trial and could not answer the question. Naming nobody in the three deaths keeps them as measurements rather than gossip, and the Croesus story supplies the rule that makes them comparable: the account cannot be settled while the man is still alive.