shame as grandiosity's aide-de-camp

The moral center of Ewell's bedside confession, and the program's whole psychology in six words: the grandiose self-will that drove the third-grade embezzlement and the shame that finally crushed him are not opposites but partners, the shame arriving as grandiosity's own subordinate officer. It is a Fifth Step delivered to a man who cannot respond — the searching moral inventory spoken aloud to a mute confessor, which turns out to be exactly the kind of witness the telling requires.