The narrative of flight and pursuit dramatises the puritan–provincial search for ‘unlawful’ knowledge and its theological, psychological and literary consequences. This chapter considers the fallen state, the alienation and failure of faith which both unjustified puritans and provincials find in themselves. Once again the Calvinist structure of perception provides an analogy for the provincial viewpoint and a metaphor for the artist. In the provincial fiction considered in chapter 4, the concept of ‘sympathy’ tended always to undermine the boundaries between self and other. This chapter shows how the breakdown of the ‘covenant of meaning’ distances self from other and overemphasises the inscrutability of appearances until, to the observer, surfaces become entirely devoid of ‘content’. This may occur within a fiction, or – even more crucially – between the narrator or author and reader. The puritan-provincial divorce of manner from matter (the ‘rhetoric of distance’) has a striking effect upon nineteenth-century Scottish and American fiction.