How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #4
In the morning they climbed down the four flights of steel ladders into the yard and stood among the prisoners for the morning lista. The lista was called by tiers yet it still took over an hour and their names were not called.
I guess we aint here, said Rawlins. (2714-5)
Rawlins and John Grady have officially disappeared in the Saltillo prison from the very start. How does this framing—and Rawlins' blasé reaction—illustrate the boys' attitudes toward overcoming tough situations?
Quote #5
I cannot do what you ask, she said. I love you. But I cannot.
He saw very clearly how all his life led only to this moment and all after led nowhere at all. He felt something cold and soulless enter him like another being and he imagined that it smiled malignly and he had no reason to believe that it would ever leave. (3577)
What is this "something" that enters John Grady? Can you see it at work elsewhere in the novel, or is this merely a passing emotion?
Quote #6
He remembered Alejandra and the sadness he'd first seen in the slope of her shoulders which he'd presumed to understand and of which he knew nothing and he felt a loneliness he'd not known since he was a child and he felt wholly alien to the world although he loved it still. He thought that in the beauty of the world were hid a secret. He thought the world's heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world's pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be extracted for the vision of a single flower. (3789)
Why was John unable to understand Alejandra? How is alienation here related to the cost that it takes to produce something beautiful? Or is this merely a reaction to his loss?