Men are ill-equipped to see themselves clearly. They overestimate or underestimate, or even conjure up things out of thin air, turning their self-assessments into caricatures. They are much more lucid in relation to others, but towards themselves they are near-sighted and fairly deranged in their judgments. A man will look upon his strengths and weaknesses with a skewed lens, distorting the image of his capabilities, and so rendering most of his actions in the world impotent either due to a lack or an excess in his self-appraisals. This is the silliness of the situation, the factor which essentially makes the straight lines of ambition curve into random results. The narrator behind the words and deeds tends to justify the flow of the story until whatever consequence is met can be explained away as being logical, rational, and full of sense rather than simply the work of haphazard fate. When a man looks upon others, the narrator has less of an influence in terms of its distorting effect, and the assessments are markedly more accurate. The situation is defined by this: that everyone can see each other better than they can see themselves, and this fact of reality allows for men to potentially use one another as mirrors that reveal their true reflections.