The Code of the Woosters

“Indeed, just before Jeeves came in, I had been dreaming that some bounder was driving spikes through my head—not just ordinary spikes, as used by Jael the wife of Heber, but red-hot ones.”

The first page of The Code of the Woosters quickly establishes its narrator/hero’s voice and character. Bertie Wooster wakes with a hangover from the previous night’s drunken party, and his mix of slang (“bounder”) and biblical allusion (“Jael[,] the wife of Heber”) typify a well-educated, fashionable, and rather frivolous young man of his time and place. In addition, the passage highlights Wooster’s (and P. G. Wodehouse’s) verbal wit and weakness for hyperbole, as well as his constant reliance on Jeeves, his ever-accommodating valet.

“I suppose that when two men of iron will live in close association with one another, there are bound to be occasional clashes, and one of these had recently popped up in the Wooster home.”

Much of Wooster’s wit is at his own expense, often unintentionally so. Here, he refers to himself as a man of “iron will”: a colorful but comically inappropriate choice of words. Rather, throughout the Wooster stories, Bertie shows himself to be consistently weak-willed and susceptible, which leads him from one farcical contretemps to another. The “clash” that Wooster refers to here is a rare instance of his not agreeing at once to his valet’s advice—i.e., his refusal to let Jeeves take him out of his comfort zone to go off on a “Round-the-World cruise.” However, by the story’s end, Jeeves, as always, has his way.