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Motifs
Definition of Paradox
A paradox is a figure of speech that seems to contradict itself, but which, upon further examination, contains some kernel of truth or reason. Oscar Wilde's famous declaration that "Life is... read full definition
A paradox is a figure of speech that seems to contradict itself, but which, upon further examination, contains some kernel of truth or reason. Oscar... read full definition
A paradox is a figure of speech that seems to contradict itself, but which, upon further examination, contains some kernel... read full definition
Chapter 5: Stevens
Explanation and Analysis—Resurrection Man:
Ridden with paradoxes, Aloysius Stevens’s chapter describes his experience in medical school and prompts a deeper reflection about slavery’s deep injustices:
The other students uttered the most horrible things about the colored population of Boston, about their smell, their intellectual deficiencies, their primitive drives. Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man’s equal[.]
In recounting the medical school students’ attitudes towards the Black cadavers, this passage presents a tangle of contradiction. The students detest the Black Boston population, and yet they rely on their bodies for their study. Their dissection work is a flagrant act of violation: they spoil a body of a person who has not consented to be studied. But Stevens shows how this process can be interpreted as an act of respect. In studying the Black body, the students honor the cadaver as a “human being” for the first time. Dissection offers the dead bodies a “second chance to contribute,” more meaningfully and honorably than enslavement ever did. “In death”—and perhaps only in death, tragically—does the Black body come closest to dignity.
The paradox is partly a mental conceit that helps Stevens justify his pillage of Black graveyards. But it does have a kernel of truth, calling attention to the unthinkable absurdities of slavery. Slavery is so inhumane that it transcends the bounds of common sense—the desecration of body-stealing simply can’t compare to anything else. By showing the reader Stevens’s line of reasoning, the novel shows how the context of slavery makes even desecration an act of comparative honor.
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