Rear Window

“Sure, I suppose it was a little bit like prying, could even have been mistaken for the fevered concentration of a Peeping Tom. That wasn’t my fault, that wasn’t the idea. The idea was, my movements were strictly limited just around this time. I could get from the window to the bed, and from the bed to the window, and that was all. The bay window was about the best feature my rear bedroom had in the warm weather. It was unscreened, so I had to sit with the light out or I would have had every insect in the vicinity in on me. I couldn’t sleep, because I was used to getting plenty of exercise. I’d never acquired the habit of reading books to ward off boredom, so I hadn’t that to turn to. Well, what should I do, sit there with my eyes tightly shuttered?”

The second paragraph puts the reader on guard, likely making them uneasy about the protagonist’s voyeurism. Hal Jeffries raises the idea that he’s a “Peeping Tom” and never manages to fully dismiss it. His litany of excuses takes on a sing-song rhythm, partly due to the syntax in which each sentence is broken up into short clauses that build on each other. The string of justifications feels almost comically inadequate, and the more that Jeff protests that there’s nothing wrong with his actions, the more readers might suspect that there is.

“And yet his scrutiny wasn’t held fixedly to any one point, it was a slow, sweeping one, moving along the houses on the opposite side from me first. When it got to the end of them, I knew it would cross over to my side and come back along there. Before it did, I withdrew several yards inside my room, to let it go safely by. I didn’t want him to think I was sitting there prying into his affairs.”

Jeff watches Lars Thorwald scanning the view from his own window. Jeff is “prying,” but he doesn’t want to be caught. Instead, he retreats into the darkness to let the gaze “go safely by.” When confronted with the potential for a reciprocal gaze, he responds to it as a threat, which colors the reader’s interpretation of Jeff’s voyeurism.

“The chain of little habits that were their lives unreeled themselves. They were all bound in them tighter than the tightest straitjacket any jailer ever devised, though they all thought themselves free.”

Jeff portrays his neighbors’ habits as confinement, projecting his sense of being trapped onto them. The line raises the question of what real freedom is. After all, one man does make a huge departure from routine. Thorwald murders his wife, and the disruption of his habits first raises Jeff’s suspicions.