My sixth chapter argues that if the promise is “a faculty for mastering the future as if it were the present,” as Paul Ricoeur puts it, then to remove the question of obligation from the act of promising, as James repeatedly does, transforms it into something closer to prophecy. This form of speech is at the heart of his late story “The Beast in the Jungle.” John Marcher’s belief in his own fate is a prophecy voiced by the very person it concerns. The result is a kind of rewriting of Oedipus. James’s hero, however, is not only fully responsible for the harm he does, he is blind from the very beginning.