He’s not brilliant. He’s emotionally closer to the students than to the adult he’s not yet convinced himself to be, as his acts throughout the story, down to the last self-deception, will show. The story is as much about a weak-willed, shallow, a tad creepy teacher as it is about the hothouse atmosphere of a high school classroom where tendrils of emotions, rivalries, deceptions, ridicule and so forth tangle and strain until, at bell time, it all suddenly ends, vanishes, as the line in the Macbeth soliloquy at the heart of the story goes: “Out, out, brief candle!” This is the passage the class is studying: