Intriguing Passages

Beginning of Chapter 10

“I was running across Lagos with my sister. We were doing a marathon, and having to push vagrants and street dogs out of our way. But I have no sister; I’m an only child. When I suddenly awoke, it was to total darkness. My eyes tried to adjust. From the warmth of the bed, the sound of traffic reached me. As always when one wakes up like this, it was impossible to tell the time. But a deeper terror immediately gripped me: I couldn’t remember where I was. A warm bed, darkness, the sound of traffic. What country is this? What is this house, and who am I with? I reached out a hand; there was no one else in the bed. Was I alone because I had no partner, or because my partner was far away? I floated in the dark, anonymous to myself, lost in the sensation that the world existed but I was no longer part of it. The first question that found its answer was about the partner: I had no partner, I was alone. The fact arrived, and it calmed me immediately. The distress had been in not knowing” (Cole 166).


 * This passage is centered around the isolation Julius feels throughout the book. The fact that he is of mixed race, and lacks any sort of connection with his family causes him to feel alone, and relationship-less. He feels this isolation not only as a result of his strenuous family ties, but of his break-up with Nadege as well.

End of Chapter 16

“Whether it expressed some civic pride or solemnized a funeral I could not tell, but so closely did the melody match my memory of those boyhood morning assemblies that I experienced the sudden disorientation and bliss of one who, in a stately old house and at a great distance from its mirrored wall, could clearly see the world doubled in on itself. I could no longer tell where the tangible universe ended and the reflected one began. This point-for-point imitation, of each porcelain vase, of each dull spot of shine on each stained teak chair, extended as far as where my reversed self had, as I had, halted itself in midturn. And this double of mine had, at that precise moment, begun to tussle with the same problem as its equally confused original. To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone” (Cole 168).


 * This passage illustrates Julius' split-personality. It seems like most of the people he meets tell him some kind of story and that he could possibly be just hearing them in his mind. The “reflected universe” would represent his other self, while this original tangible universe represents his normal self. The passage also reflects the difficulties Julius has had to overcome in his past. Perhaps the alternate self that he is struggling with is the Julius from the past. Cole switches between past and present in this passage. He transitions from boyhood, to his current self. He also uses a large amount of commas, which forces the reader to stop and go and absorb what Julius is saying along the way.

Chapter 20

“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have, through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason." (Cole 238)


 * Teju Cole is describing Julius’ situation in the story itself. What is meant by that is Julius, or any other main character in a novel, usually plays this “heroic” role, and not the villain. However, there is a bit of contrast between that statement and Julius. In chapter twenty, the reader finds out that Julius had raped Moji eighteen years ago at a party, which really does not say “heroic” to the reader at all. This horrid act Julius pulled was an “evil” act, but I think the end of this quote, “They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason”,  directly relates to Moji and Julius remaining friends, despite what occurred years ago. The rhetorical question Cole asks, “Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes?”, I think, can be interpreted as a question he wants the readers to relate to. After much thought myself,