How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
Now it was as though we had not surrendered at all, we had joined forces with the men who had been our enemies against a new foe whose means we could not always fathom but whose aim we could always dread. (6.2.10)
Talk about amnesia. All of Bayard's conscious life has been spent hating the Yankees, wanting to beat the Union in a war, and hoping to drive the northerners out of the South. Now that the war is over, everyone is supposed to forget those aims and start hoping that the Yankees will come in and rebuild. We can see by the novel, though, that forgetting isn't so easy.
Quote #8
People talk glibly of presentiment, but I had none. (7.1.1)
We kind of like Bayard's admission as a narrator here. A lot of novels let their readers know that something terrible is going to happen by letting a character have a presentiment, a feeling about the future, but here he admits freely that that didn't happen. The funny thing is that admitting he didn't have a presentiment lets the reader know that something is about to happen, namely John's death.
Quote #9
I should have known; I should have been prepared. Or maybe I was prepared because I remember how I closed the book carefully, even marking the place, before I rose. (7.1.2)
There was no way for Bayard to know about or be prepared for his father's death, but the fact that he's telling the story long after the fact makes it so the memory gets all bunched up, as though he could have somehow been prepared for what hadn't happened yet. He uses his careful movements and memories as proof that he was prepared.