How we cite our quotes: (Line)
Quote #1
I summoned executioners to bite their gun-butts as I died. I summoned plagues, to stifle myself with sand and blood. Misfortune was my god. I stretched out in the mud. I dried myself in the breezes of crime. And I played some fine tricks on madness. (6)
There may be no "I" in team, but there sure are a lot of "I"s in these lines. The speaker comes off as a true loner here, someone who revels in the being an outsider, a criminal, even a madman. As somebody who's looking to critique his society, though, it seems fitting that he would describe himself as totally outside of that world.
Quote #2
I sit, a leper, among broken pots and nettles, at the foot of a wall ravaged by the sun. – Later, a mercenary, I'd have bivouacked under German midnights. (20)
Man, the speaker sounds pretty alone here. To be a "leper" in the less-than-sensitive days of yesteryear was to be an outcast, someone kept outside of conventional society. Even when he's fantasizing about his military past, the speaker's a "mercenary," someone for hire, with no particular ties or allegiances.
Quote #3
Still a child, I admired the stubborn convict on whom the prison gates always close again: I visited inns and lodgings that he might have sanctified with his presence: I saw the blue sky with his mind, and the flowering labour of the countryside: I scented his fate in the towns. He had more strength than a saint, more good sense than a traveller – and he, he alone! As witness to his glory and reason. (41)
Firefighter, doctor, astronaut—all of these are professions that kids are known to look up to. But convicts? Not so much. Our speaker, however, seems to identify with the convict's outsider, loner status. We admit: it takes a lot of strength to bear that isolated lot in life, which is why people tend to avoid things like, you know, going to jail.