30.11.2022(What Do I Read Next?)

 What Do I Read Next?

The narrator's distance—and alienation—from home is significant and will figure into the complex moral equations he explores regarding ethics of escape. But readers don't know now to whom the narrator is writing, nor why "there is something wrong about the story nothing can fix." Soon, however, the narrator begins to explain how one story overtook another, how the letter he never finished became the story he's telling now. He also maps out some of the moral territory across which his narrative and intellectual journey will take place.

 First, he says, he wanted to tell Aunt May's story, let her voice come through him to tell the tale of great-great-great-grandmother Sybela Owens' flight to freedom. But as clearly as he hears May's voice working through him, he is also nagged by the question why he ' 'was on a Greek island and why you were six thousand miles away in prison and what all that meant and what I could say to you about it." At first, telling May's and Sybela's story seemed as simple as it was important: "the theme was to be the urge for freedom, the resolve of the runaway to live free or die.

"But the narrator soon discovers the disquieting fact that when he tries to connect Sybela's story to his brother's, he's unable to maintain the safety of his objective storytelling stance: "I couldn't tell either story without implicating myself." What he runs up against is "the matter of guilt, of responsibility," and he finds he must include himself in the reckoning. Then movement of his narrative from the cafe in the Greek islands back to Homewood, back, in fact, to Sybela Owens and the beginning of Homewood, is a return to the place from which he believed he had escaped. But in returning he finds that he must face matters ofguilt and responsibility; he must, as the storyteller, set his brother's crime against "the crime of this female runaway.

"The narrator's reckoning process requires that he reconsider Sybela's story in light of both his own and his brother's life. When he revisits her "dash for freedom," he finds that he wants to dwell on her first day of freedom, but cannot. The reason his imagination won't stay fixed on how Sybela felt and what she thought that first day when she isn't awakened by the sound of the conch shell is that her freedom is compromised and mediated, not simple, as he had always thought it was. Sybela's freedom is incomplete, and her autonomy limited. 

She trades absolute freedom—and the risk of death and capture— for the protection she gets from remaining with Charlie Bell. On her first day of freedom, Sybela "misses the moaning horn and hates the white man, her lover, her liberator, her children's father sleeping beside her." In other words, the line between slavery and freedom is not absolute, nor is the boundary between evil and good, and hate and love. 

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