How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"They are always forming into fours and marching in troops with badges on their caps; they salute simultaneously passing the figure of their general. How majestic is their order, how beautiful is their obedience! If I could follow, if I could be with them, I would sacrifice all I know. But they also leave butterflies trembling with their wings pinched off; they throw dirty pocket-handkerchiefs clotted with blood screwed up into corners. They make little boys sob in dark passages." (2b.29)
Louis views the boasting boys as "majestic" but also brutal. Despite their brutality, Neville and Louis want to be like them, admiring their "beautiful… obedience." It sounds like they're followers more than authority figures, but they do seem to be quite the bullies. It's weird that Neville and Louis hate their authoritarian headmaster so much but still revere people who bully others.
Quote #8
"I see India," said Bernard. "I see the low, long shore; I see the tortuous lanes of stamped mud that lead in and out among ramshackle pagodas; I see the gilt and crenellated buildings which have an air of fragility and decay as if they were temporarily run up buildings in some Oriental exhibition. I see a pair of bullocks who drag a low cart along the sun-baked road. The cart sways incompetently from side to side… But now, behold, Percival advances; Percival rides a flea-bitten mare, and wears a sun-helmet. By applying the standards of the West, by using the violent language that is natural to him, the bullock-cart is righted in less than five minutes. The Oriental problem is solved. He rides on; the multitude cluster round him, regarding him as if he were—what indeed he is—a God." (4b.53)
With this fantasy of Percival swooping in and "solving" the "Oriental problem," Woolf creates a nice advertisement for British imperialism, with Percival as its poster boy. Is the take-home, then, that authority is okay as long as it advances the imperial British effort? Isn't it a little weird that Bernard and Neville mistrust Crane's pompous authority but see nothing wrong with saying that their friend could have been a "God" to the people in India?
Quote #9
"Yet if someone had but said: 'Wait'; had pulled the strap three holes tighter—he would have done justice for fifty years, and sat in Court and ridden alone at the head of troops and denounced some monstrous tyranny, and come back to us." (5b.4)
Here, in the wake of Percival's death, Neville is lamenting that Percival didn't get the chance to "do justice," because he thinks that his friend would have been able to prevent a "monstrous tyranny." Is that why Percival's authority is okay, then? He would have used it to resist tyranny?