Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [844]

I turned so that he couldn’t see my face because now I had a feeling my emotions were all too obvious: Confusion, fear, hope… Of course I had intended to go alone, and of course I hadn’t told anyone that I was leaving. And I had not decided yet how Dad’s disappearance would affect my going. That raised frightening questions. What are my responsibilities? What will happen to my brothers if I leave them to Cory? They’re her sons, and she’ll move the earth to take care of them, keep them fed and clothed and housed. But can she do it alone? How? — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 844

Note

Butler renders interiority by turning the body away: the physical gesture of hiding the face is what lets the narration admit the emotion it is concealing, and the colon-then-list (‘Confusion, fear, hope…’) makes the feeling arrive as an unedited inventory rather than a stated mood. The shift from narration into free indirect questions — short, escalating, self-interrogating — is the real craft move: the paragraph starts as disclosure and ends as a mind arguing with itself, unresolved, with the final one-word question left hanging.