How we cite our quotes: (Chapter, Paragraph)
Quote #7
He frowns. "I was wrong. I was stupid." He looks away. "I was willfully blind."
I remember his words comforting me about the Spackle.
We've all made mistakes, Todd. All of us. (36.103-105)
Ben teaches Todd an important lesson about guilt: It doesn't take doing something bad to be guilty; you can be guilty because you didn't do the right thing. Sure, Ben didn't murder the women, like his fellow Prentisstown men, but he didn't stand up for what was right, either.
Quote #8
"For the last boy to become a man," Ben says. "When boys became men, they were told the truth. Or a version of it, anyway. And then they were made complicit themselves."
I remember his Noise from back on the farm, about my birthday, about how a boy becomes a man.
About what complicity really means and how it can be passed on. (36.132-134)
Complicity is a word that gets thrown around, like guilt, and it means pretty much the same thing—only instead of being guilty by yourself, complicity means that you're guilty alongside other people. The curse of Prentisstown is that all of the members share the guilt of the crimes that they committed.
Quote #9
"You were the final test," Aaron says. "The last boy. The one that completes us. With you in the army, there's no weak link. We would be truly blessed. If one of us falls, we all fall, Todd. All of us have to fall." He clenched his fists and looks up again. "So we can be reborn! So we can take this cursed world and remake it in—" (41.80)
Prentisstown tries to make Todd guilty so that he fits in. Here, guilt is like a horrible initiation process—if Todd's guilty of one murder, then he can share the guilt of everyone else. For some reason, Aaron's trying to make it seem as if the town can re-define itself by the guilt that everyone shares.