How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #10
The African youth stood before us, a gawky and immobile spectacle. He said, "I cannot fight—nor can I refrain—without imputations of savagery."
And he finished, in a voice not of defiance, but suffused with realization: "I am no one. I am not a man. I am nothing." (2.34.17-18)
Even though this is a passage coming from Mr. Gitney and Mr. Sharpe's (dry) scientific article on the effect of smallpox on Africans, it's anything but boring. In fact, we'll admit that this passage drove us to squeeze a couple of tears out of our tear ducts. Why? Because this "African youth" Mr. Gitney is writing about is Octavian.
Octavian's just found out his mother has died and sees her dissected, lying on a lab table. So he responds in silence. But Mr. Sharpe says his silence is a sign of his natural African dumbness, so of course, Octavian responds to Mr. Sharpe in total anger, which just leads Mr. Sharpe to observe that—whoa—now Octavian is really a savage. Sigh. Octavian just can't win, and that's what he points out to the men in the room—it doesn't matter what human response he gives, he'll be seen as a savage animal.
What's ironic, of course, is that Octavian shows how human he is through his emotional responses. What the men are trying to corner him into becoming is an unrealistic, inhuman robot of a man—or, you know, somebody who probably just doesn't exist.
Quote #11
Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, racing this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us; consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all causality, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still. (4.11.9)
Octavian, captured by Mr. Sharpe and now bound and masked, has nothing to do but think, so he's thinking about the conditions of all those slaves out there, including Hosiah Lister, the old slave who fought and died for the Patriots.
Lister's epitaph is just one line about how—now dead—he has received freedom, and Octavian can't help thinking about how sad and yet how appropriate that epitaph is. After all, as far as Octavian knows, death is the ultimate release, the ultimate guarantor of freedom from bondage.
We want to point out that Octavian's conclusion—that death gives slaves a freedom of "unbeing" and "nonentity"—is a careful one. What do we mean? Well, Octavian isn't going around saying there's a hell or a heaven, despite all his prayers to God earlier in the book—he is still a scientist in the end, and a scientist should not conclude beyond what the evidence shows him or her.
He can only conclude, therefore, that whatever comes in death is what he sees—which are corpses, no longer conscious and responsive to an identity or human state of being. It's a point in the novel that subtly shows the fine line Octavian walks between religious faith and scientific reasoning.