How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Page)
Quote #13
When one grief afflicts us we choose a sharper grief/in hope that enormity will ease affliction,/so Catherine Weldon rose in high relief/through the thin page of a cloud, making a fiction/of my own loss. (XXXV.iii.181)
The narrator seeks solace in the grief of others—in this case, the plight of Catherine Weldon and the Plains Indians—but not because he's sadistic. By reading Weldon's story, the narrator is so completely taken up by the tragedy of another lost culture that his own loss pales in comparison.
Quote #14
[…] for the road-warrior/had paused in the smoke, not for Omeros's gods/nor the masks of his origins, the god-river,/the god-snake, but for the One that had gathered his race/in the shoal of a net, a confirmed believer/in his own hell, that his spectre's punishment was/a halt in its passage towards a smokeless place. (LVIII.ii.292)
To the narrator's surprise (and ours), he encounters Hector in hell. He's not suffering in the pit because he was a particularly bad guy; Hector made a serious mistake in choosing to believe in the god of the colonialists. Walcott's not so much saying that Christianity is bad as he is that Hector has to suffer in the place designated by his adopted religion. Perhaps he's also suffering there because he was a "traitor" to his ancestral spiritual beliefs.