raux describes Gisors getting ready to take his daily measure of opium, no more than five pellets a day. “His hands, which were preparing a new pellet, were trembling. Even his love for Kyo did not free him from his total solitude. But if he could not escape from himself into another being, he knew how to find relief: there was opium” (68). In attributing opium addiction to Gisors, Malraux is again able to symbolically show the reader the abuses of the Chinese people, the sense of hopelessness of their condition. Katov is a Russian communist and one of the organizers of the insurrection. He is the quintessential existentialist. In the end, Katov gives the poison he saved for himself to the other captured comrades, allowing them to avoid the unbearable torture and death by fire that he will eventually suffer. He is a hero who demonstrates Malraux’s:...conviction that the best in man is inviolable [...] man’s capacity to maintain his dignity, in the teeth of life’s degradations, humiliations and disfranchisements, so that man’s ever threatened and always dubious existence derives its ultimate meaning from his ability to maintain his dignity for its own sake” (Langlois 161)....
