The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: little the story had impressed him!
Granice was overcome by the futility of any farther attempt to
inculpate himself. He was chained to life--a "prisoner of
consciousness." Where was it he had read the phrase? Well, he
was learning what it meant. In the glaring night-hours, when his
brain seemed ablaze, he was visited by a sense of his fixed
identity, of his irreducible, inexpugnable SELFNESS, keener, more
insidious, more unescapable, than any sensation he had ever
known. He had not guessed that the mind was capable of such
intricacies of self-realization, of penetrating so deep into its
own dark windings. Often he woke from his brief snatches of
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