So we follow him from Papeete into the backwoods. We find him holding aloof from the savages at first and marveling at their simple hospitality. We see him making his first tentative attempts at establishing a community of thought. He tries to persuade the natives to sit for their portraits--with little success. He tries to find solace in the companionship of the half-caste Titi, in vain. Then Jotefa comes upon the scene, the young man whose body reveals to him the hitherto unsuspected fact that civilization has only accentuated differences of sex, and thereby rendered sex more dangerous, more artificial, more unnatural. So he gets his first gleam of intelligence. The next comes, when Jotefa declares that he cannot touch the chisel, that an artist is not like other men, but some one producing a thing useful to others. This further enlightens him. He contrasts this opinion on art as something useful to man with art as the European sees it, a mere freakish amusement. Finally, he hazards everything. He takes a young native girl and makes her his wife, not without qualms of fear. All goes well until one day away from home, when he is out fishing with the natives. They laugh at his luck. He asks them why. Because his line has caught in the lower jaw of the fish and that is a sign of a man's wife being unfaithful to him. He returns home, half-believing the superstition. The native girl prays, weeps, asks to be beaten. He cannot beat her. He can only forgive and understand. So the story closes. From such a story, we should naturally receive the impression that Gauguin's life in Tahiti was ideally happy. But his letters reveal that he was even more unhappy there than in France. So whatever elements of fact may be in his story, it is evident that they cannot be disentangled from the fictional details. It is better to take "Noa Noa" altogether as a series of fictitious adventures, designed to bring out the fact that Gauguin became, despite himself, as nearly one with the natives as it is possible for any European to be. Thus we see, bit by bit, the Tahitians claiming him as one of their own, from the day that he is forced by necessity to accept their food offered and at first scornfully refused, to the day when he finds that he shares their superstitions and even their easy tolerance of marital infidelity. If we look at the story in this light, it becomes an allegory easily readable, an allegory of civilization going down before primitive nature, expressed in a series of parables.