How we cite our quotes: (Paragraph)
Quote #1
I dont like to be laughed at.
Rawlins looked at the girls. They were sitting again and their eyes were wide and serious again. Hell, he said. It's just kids.
I dont like to be laughed at, whispered Blevins. (828-30)
This sequence is the first that highlights Blevins' sensitivity to slights on his honor, which sometimes prompts him to rash action, including some of his defining criminal acts. Despite the innocence of the laughter and the youth of the girls doing the laughing, he seems very disturbed, suggesting a deep insecurity.
Quote #2
I grew up in a world of men […]. I was also rebellious […] yet I think that I had no wish to break things. Or perhaps only those things that wished to break me. The names of the entities that have power to constrain us change with time. Convention and authority are replaced by infirmity. But my attitude toward them has not changed. Has not changed. (1948)
How would you explain Alfonsa's feelings about authority here? Why would she be rebellious, disgusted with the powers constraining her, yet have no wish to "break" things? What might she stand to lose?
Quote #3
The captain had put one arm around the boy, or he put his hand in the small of his back. Like some kindly advisor. The other man walked behind them carrying the rifle and Blevins disappeared into the ebony trees […]. There seemed insufficient substance to him to be the object of men's wrath. There seemed nothing about him sufficient to fuel any enterprise at all. (2669-70)
Blevins' smallness as he is being led to death, contrasted with the apparent (yet false) gentleness of the captain's manner, suggests a fundamental, disproportional injustice to the act that follows—like squashing a bug with one of those gigantic battle Q-Tips that people use in American Gladiators.