"Nature of mermen" . He gets lazy when he's nicer to him. That's the gist of the chapter's opening soliloquy. It's a metaphor for the way men treat one another, and it's one of the main themes of the novel. The narrator says that men treat each other as if they're equals, and that's why they get so lazy. He says that when a man is nicer to his lover, he gets lazy, too. He's talking about the fact that a man will get lazy when his lover is nice to him, and he'll get lazy even more when he treats his lover badly. This is the nature of the merman, the narrator says, and we're going to find out what that means in the next chapter.