Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [491]

Is it necessary to write things like that? Everyone knows them. What do they mean now, anyway? What does this one mean if you live in a cul-de-sac with a wall around it? What does it mean if you’re damned lucky to live in a cul-de-sac with a wall around it? — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 491

Note

A rare passage where the narrator interrogates the rhetoric of the novel she’s in. The repeated ‘What does it mean if…’ is a self-tightening screw: the first question is abstract, the second supplies the concrete situation (the walled cul-de-sac), and the third adds ‘damned lucky,’ which is the actual crux — the wall works, and that’s the problem. Four sentences, no answers, and the idiom (‘damned lucky’) lands hardest precisely because it’s the one word the narrator can’t keep neutral.