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Chapter 28
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Babel, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Colonization and Racism
Language, Translation, and Power
Race, Gender, and Intersectionality
Violence and Nonviolence
Complicity
Summary
Analysis
The mood in the tower grows despondent after Professor Chakravarti leaves. The food supply also begins to dwindle. There are seven days left until Westminster Bridge is scheduled to fall. None of the strikers wants to think about what might happen, and they settle into a monotonous routine. Victoire helps Robin get through it, but she’s still furious with him because he advocated for letting Westminster Bridge fall, despite the high potential for civilian casualties.
While Victoire doesn’t leave the group like Professor Chakravarti does, she still opposes Robin and the group’s decision to let innocent people die. The novel suggests that the strike that Robin and Victoire started doesn’t disband in part because they do not let themselves be fractured by their disagreements.
Themes
Victoire and Robin talk about Letty and ask each other whether Letty would have turned on them no matter what. Robin says he’s convinced that Letty intentionally killed Ramy because she couldn’t bear the humiliation of being rejected by him. Victoire takes out the daguerreotype of the four of them together. They all look young and happy. Victoire says she thinks Letty just wanted a group of friends. When things didn’t work out, Victoire says, she probably felt just as betrayed as Robin and Victoire felt.
The discussion between Victoire and Robin also shows the differences between Robin and Victoire’s characters. While Robin is angry and wants to find evidence of evil in Letty’s actions, Victoire, while no less upset than Robin, responds to what Letty did with empathy. This points to Robin’s increasing comfort with violence: he now thinks the worst of (at least some) others.
Themes
Ibrahim, one of the strikers, keeps a notebook. He says he aims to document the history of the strike and, if possible, some of the history of the Hermes Society. He’s hopeful that no matter how things turn out, maybe that record will help shape the historical perception of their movement. Soldiers in the Army don’t try to take the tower, but they begin to shoot at the strikers every chance they get. A bullet barely misses Victoire. Abel sends some of his people to take positions in the tower to shoot at the Army when it approaches. Yusuf, another one of the strikers, drafts a treaty that will give them all clemency if the government decides to open negotiations.
Ibrahim aims to document the history of the Hermes Society and the strike with the aim of shaping how historians think about the movement. The full title of the novel is Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution. With that in mind, the novel suggests that Ibrahim’s notebook may be one of the primary sources that a fictional historian who “wrote” the novel consulted to provide the history of the strike at Babel.
Themes
