Content Warning: This section of the guide makes reference to violence, racism, anti-gay bias, anti-trans bias, and sexual violence. 

“Were they shameful? I don’t see eye to eye with that. Let me call them our dancing days. Why the hell not. After all we was only children obliged to survive in a dangerous terrain.”

Thomas’s characterization of his and John’s childhoods—as full of events that weren’t shameful because they were necessary for survival—sets the tone for his perspective on many of the horrific events that he sees in the remainder of his life. Though Thomas does not unilaterally justify all terrible actions as necessary, he does maintain a pragmatic approach to many of the difficulties of his life, a strategy which helps him survive.

“I only say it because without saying I don’t think anything can be properly understood. How we were able to see slaughter without flinching. Because we were nothing ourselves, to begin with.”

As Thomas discusses his memory of the fever sheds in Canada, where he was quarantined after fleeing a famine-ridden Ireland, he claims that he must say things to understand them. However, this is one aspect of his history which he shies away from describing. Ironically, Thomas’s lack of description still offers a certain kind of understanding—given the horrors of his later life, which he discusses without issue, his silence on the topic of the fever sheds suggests the depth of the violence he witnessed there.

“The mind is a wild liar and I don’t trust much in it that I find there. To tell a story I have to trust it but I can issue a warning like a ticket master issuing a ticket for a western-bound train that will be obliged to go through wilderness, Indians, outlaws, and storms.”

Though Thomas does not necessarily meet the definition of an unreliable narrator, his assessment of stories and memory here reminds audience that he is a