The comparison of the lawyer’s reading during his rigorous solitary confinement to the act of swimming in the sea following a shipwreck sounds quite apt.
By accepting to live in solitary confinement for fifteen continuous years, the lawyer has staked the most vital period of his life. If he succumbs, he might ruin himself. His situation has been appropriately compared to that of a man, who is swimming desperately in the sea after his ship...
The comparison of the lawyer’s reading during his rigorous solitary confinement to the act of swimming in the sea following a shipwreck sounds quite apt.
By accepting to live in solitary confinement for fifteen continuous years, the lawyer has staked the most vital period of his life. If he succumbs, he might ruin himself. His situation has been appropriately compared to that of a man, who is swimming desperately in the sea after his ship is destroyed.
The man constantly clutches "first at one spar and then at another" in order to drift ashore. Similarly, the lawyer finishes reading book after book during his imprisonment.
To the lawyer, it is only reading that could help him pass the long period of time that appears unending as a sea.
What he reads range from “novels with a complicated love plot, sensational and fantastic stories” and classics to languages, philosophy, and history; from Gospel and “histories of religion” to books on natural sciences, chemistry and medicine.
Thus, he reads everything that he could think of. The books provide him with the support and moral strength he essentially needs to spend the vast span of time all alone in his isolated cell.
So, we see that his voracious reading of books is very aptly represented in the image of a man "swimming in the sea among the wreckage of his ship, and trying to save his life by greedily clutching first at one spar and then at another."
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