If one reads back from this point into the previous paragraph, it is evident that
Victor has attempted in some sense to change the subject. His first vocative, set
in the past tense of his return to his native land, is fraught with excess, even deranged,
emotion. Victor quickly displaces it with a new, contemporary, seemingly spontaneous
effusion that, being conventionally patriotic, has the virtue of concealing the all-too
bared soul of his past self and repressing its neurotic symptoms.