Flood. I felt like the questions that she kept raising to and about Motes were questions that I would have been raising. For the most part, they were many of the questions that I kept raising though out the novel. There was one question in particular that she raised that has kept me wondering if Motes ever received his redemption. "How would he know if time was going backward or forward or if he was going with it?" It made me wonder if he blinded himself as a form of repentance. I thought that maybe he stopped preaching and was torturing himself for Jesus, but then when Mrs. Flood asks him about his preaching he says, "If you believed in Jesus, you wouldn't be so good." If he were trying to repent, why would he say that? The story about Enoch Emery seemed to be a whole different story all together. His story seemed to be one about a boy who had been rejected all of his life, cast into a city that trapped and destroyed him. In a strange way, the city that he was forced to live in turned him, his personality and his appearance (gorilla suit), into an animal. The animal that he became was similar to the animals that he had to visit everyday; the animals that he hated. Chapter 12 presents a descriptive image of what the American City had done to Enoch Emery. "He had the sense that he was setting off to get some honor, but he was very nervous, as if he were afraid he might have to snatch it instead of receive it." This is exactly what became of Enoch Emery; he became an animal that had to "snatch" everything that came to him in a city were "people ain't friendly."Both Motes and Emery were young men looking for acceptance and piece of mind in a city filled with corruption, whoring, false preaching, and very few morals. They were outsiders, driven to insanity by a world that did not accept them or their beliefs. Both had struggled with their problems though out their lives, only to be pushed to their limits in the end. O'Conn...
