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Chapter 6
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
On Monday, Robin finds a note wedged into his window. He recognizes Griffin’s sloppy handwriting. The note is in code, and it takes Robin a while to decipher it. Eventually, he figures out that it’s a message telling Robin to open the door to Babel exactly at midnight the next time it rains. On Wednesday, it rains. Robin walks to Babel. He opens the door, which he’s able to do because the building has his blood on file. Just then, two people from the Hermes Society emerge from the shadows and slip in the door. Robin waits in the foyer, as Griffin’s instructions told him to. Five minutes later, Robin leaves, again following Griffin’s instructions. That night, Robin has trouble sleeping. Two days later, he receives another message from Griffin, telling him to await further instructions. Robin doesn’t hear from Griffin again for weeks.
This passage further explores questions of complicity. Robin is now convinced that Babel actively supports colonization and exploitation of people from other countries. To avoid complicity in Babel’s immoral actions, Robin joins the Hermes Society. By participating in the Hermes Society’s crimes of stealing from Babel, Robin becomes complicit in theft. Notably, Babel’s immoral power structures are not technically illegal. Instead, Babel is acting with the full support of the English government. The passage suggests, though, that it can be morally permissible to break the law if one is combating injustice, regardless of whether that injustice is technically illegal or not.
Themes
Over those next few weeks, Robin attends classes like normal. He and his cohort—which consists of him, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty—continue to grow closer. Robin and Victoire bond over a shared love of literature. The group often gets into arguments and debates, but those debates only serve to bring them closer. After a few months together, Robin realizes that he loves Ramy, Victoire, and Letty. To him, they’ve come to feel like family. He also loves Oxford. He has a hard time reconciling the love he feels with his knowledge that Oxford’s wealth is based on injustice.
Robin explicitly points out how conflicted he feels about loving Oxford while finding much of what the institution does and represents morally reprehensible. That conflict is a conflict between Robin’s personal experience—which is mostly enjoyable—and his awareness of systemic injustice. Robin will continue to try and navigate that tension as the novel proceeds.
Themes
