When I was a child I was always stumbling across things like this in the library. (Maybe it didn't happen all that often, but often enough, and it left an impression.) I would stand there in the aisle, reading the passage over and over in a hot fog of fascination and horror and shame, blushing and sweating, slamming the book shut if anyone walked past the aisle. Maybe furtively return to it on the next trip to the library. Not this particular book, of course, but there are many, many like it--Fox's Book of Martyrs, that kind of thing. The narrator's weirdly innocent mix of horror and amazement reminds me of that feeling.
The bits about his manly courage and resignation, the contrast between his handsome form before the impalement and his bugeyed agony after, are strangely guileless. We're used to that kind of thing written by someone like Mishima, someone knowing--someone whose fascination is cultivated and conscious and maybe a little bit showy, a little bit faked--here the same fascination seems nascent, ignorant, innocent. It's never occurred to this person to be fascinated by such a thing; he seems like he doesn't quite realize that he is.
I came across this on a side excursion from some endless vitriolic 1870 debates over whether what a pair of British travelers saw impaled on a hillside in Bosnia was a person or a sack of beans. A Google Books search on liddon maccoll impalement will show you the way into the fray; you may find your own way out. I learned one thing that illuminated a puzzling passage above, the bit about the stake being "driven by the executioner into his back-bone." It seemed to me (and I think I'm right) that if a stake were really driven into your spine, you would be unlikely to survive the hour, let alone the night--but apparently the actual practice was to drive the stake between the backbone and the skin.
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