Once more the language casts the mine as an active and malicious presence. Compare it luring Charles Gould farther than he intended to go , and corrupting his judgment. As always, we should read the active agent thematically as being the dream-ideal itself. But though the narrator equates the "deadly" grip on father and son, note that in the father's case he alone perished. In the son's, given the context of this paragraph, the word "deadly" takes on quite another meaning.