Silence: Chapter 8 Summary & Analysis

The next day, the interpreter sternly tries one last time to reason with Rodrigues, but the priest tells him he’d rather be tortured than apostatize. The priest is not so much brave as numb; physical pain seems distant and obsolete. As the priest expects, the guards no longer feed him or treat him well, and the following day a guard tightly binds his hands. The mistreatment, long expected, causes the priest to feel a sense of “elation.” He is put on a donkey’s back and paraded through the streets of Nagasaki to be jeered and mocked.

Rodrigues thinks of Christ riding a donkey through Jerusalem and decides that he will wear a smile the entire time, no matter what abuse he endures. When Kichijiro emerges from the crowd, the priest realizes that in spite of his several treacheries, the coward is also his most faithful friend. The priest nods to Kichijiro, trying to signal his forgiveness and consolation, but Kichijiro, ashamed, disappears into the crowd. After traveling and being jeered at for many miles, the priest’s smile hardens into scorn and he closes his eyes to block out the mockery, wondering as he does what expression Christ wore when the crowd at Pilate’s house called for His death.

The interpreter walks beside Rodrigues’s horse and leads him to Inoue’s house, telling him that Inoue has determined that the priest will apostatize this very evening. The priest believes this means he will finally be tortured, and he takes solace in the fact that when he dies, he will be united with Mokichi, Ichizo, Garrpe, Christ, and all the other Christian martyrs. The interpreter again asks the priest to apostatize, reassuring him that they are only words, they do not have to mean anything. When the priest refuses, the interpreter looks saddened.

Rodrigues is locked in a small cell at the magistrate’s house without windows or light. The floor is covered with urine. Although he cannot see, the priest, feeling with his hands across the walls, discovers that a former occupant of the room (most likely another priest) has carved the Christian phrase Laudate Eum into the wall. As Rodrigues waits for hours in the utter darkness, he thinks again of Christ’s face, which this time seems nearer, and the face gazes at him sorrowfully and speaks, “When you suffer, I suffer with you. To the end I am close with you.”

Somewhere, on the other side of the prison walls, Rodrigues can hear what seems to be snoring; and it strikes him as ironic that one man sleeps while he waits for his death. Terror intermittently takes hold of him and then releases him. Through the wall, the priest can hear multiple voices and an argument, and the voice of Kichijiro shouting, “Father, forgive me! I have come to make my confession and receive absolution. Forgive me!” Kichijiro keeps shouting, and the priest puts his fingers in his ears to block out the voice, but even as he does so he mouths the words of absolution for the treacherous man, reflecting bitterly once again on the quandary of Judas and how Christ could love a man—if he loved him at all—whom he knew would betray him.

The snoring sound continues, growing so present in Rodrigues’s mind that he sits on the floor and begins to laugh at the strange quality of it, both human and animal-sounding. The disturbance it causes the priest on what he presumes is the night of his death builds in his mind until he is in a rage and beats his fists on the wall of his cell. The interpreter and Ferreira open the door of the cell and ask what the matter is. When the priest tells him he is only bothered by the snoring, Ferreira tells him it is not snoring, but “the moaning of Christians hanging in the pit.”

Ferreira enters the cell alone and speaks with Rodrigues. It was Ferreira who carved the letters on the wall during his own imprisonment. Rodrigues still considers Ferreira a traitor, until Ferreira reveals that he himself hung in the pit for three days and did not apostatize, nor utter a word against God. But when Ferreira was left in the cell, listening to other people suffer on his behalf, when he found he could not praise God in the midst of the suffering he heard, when he prayed for God to end it and God did nothing, he broke. Rodrigues tries to resist his arguments, but his mind thinks back to all the Christians he watched die in the midst of God’s silence.

Ferreira argues that by making others suffer on his behalf, Rodrigues regards himself as “more important than them.” He is concerned with saving himself rather than others, afraid to become the “dregs of the Church.” If Christ were in their position, he argues, Christ would certainly apostatize to save the sufferers. Rodrigues tries to deny him, but his resolve is crumbling. Understanding this from personal experience, Ferreira lays his hand on Rodrigues’s shoulder and tells him, “You are now going to perform the most painful act of love that has ever been performed.”

Ferreira leads Rodrigues slowly, painfully out of the cell and to the interpreter, who is waiting for them with a fumie. Looking down at the metal image, the priest sees “the ugly face of Christ,” and prays to God, expressing his pain at trampling on this face, the most beautiful and hallowed thing in the priest’s life. As his foot hovers above the fumie, dawn begins to break, the light touching upon the priest’s frail neck and shoulders. His foot seems filled with pain. The metal face of Christ speaks, “Trample! Trample! I more than anyone know the pain in your foot. Trample! It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men’s pain that I carried my cross.” The priest steps onto the fumie. “Dawn broke. And far in the distance the cock crew.”