The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party Themes

In Octavian Nothing, education is all tied up with moral ethics. What is the right way to educate a person, especially if that person happens to be enslaved? Is it okay to educate an enslaved perso...

Octavian Nothing forces us to see how masculine ideas about women and femininity can be super-restrictive and limiting. How does the book do that? By making one woman the only female character in...

Be prepared for anything under the philosophical sun if you've decided to read Octavian Nothing. The novel is non-stop with its references to major western philosophies, and it also gets super-deep...

Is America a land of plenty, given to the colonials by God? Is it the land of liberty and freedom? Or is it a land that was stolen from those who were here first—the Native Americans—and then l...

In Octavian Nothing, coming of age isn't about overcoming some major obstacle midway through the book. The obstacle—slavery—is a birthright (if you can call something so terrible a birthright)...

Octavian Nothing could have been a book about a single mother and her son if not for the fact that the mother-son duo are enslaved and live in a college of male philosophers and scientists. Those m...

At the core of Octavian Nothing is the fundamental hypocrisy of the pre-revolutionary American colonies' fight for freedom from British tyranny. How could American colonials claim their "enslavemen...

Why are there all those scratched-out pages in the middle of the novel? How does Octavian's expression of his suffering change throughout the book? How do Private Goring's pains compare to O...

Art and culture—especially music—have everything to do with escaping in Octavian Nothing. You might be thinking, "Oh that means art and culture aren't all that important because they're escapis...

Everyone expects war to be ugly, brutal, and violent, but in Octavian Nothing, war—specifically, the American Revolution—is also the worst form of hypocrisy. That's because while the Patriots a...