An Imaginary Life

by

David Malouf

An Imaginary Life: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Ovid wonders if he made some grave mistake in bringing the Child to Tomis. The Child lies in a hut all day, passively, doing nothing. He whimpers but never cries, which Ovid thinks would at least make him seem like the little boy he is. The Child seems to have no sense of self-awareness or shame. Even when Ovid has to wash him after he soils himself, the Child accepts everything with a “passivity” that Ovid finds disturbing, as if they have already killed his spirit.
Ovid only realizes that taking the Child out of the wilderness may have been a mistake after he does it. This suggests that before the villagers caught the Child, Ovid never once considered that perhaps he would be better off in the wilderness, away from human society and all of its ills.
Themes
Suffering and Personal Growth Theme Icon
Language, Perception, and Nature Theme Icon
Childhood, Fate, and Identity Theme Icon
The Child has toughened feet and a thin line of hair down his spine. Although Ovid does not find this unusual, the village women take it as a sign that the Child has a bestial spirit, and they refuse to come near him. Ryzak’s grandson, Lullo, spreads the rumor that the Child is covered in hair and has hooves. Ovid hoped that Lullo would take an interest in the Child, since they are nearly the same age, but Lullo seems to loathe him. Lullo fears, as the village women and shaman do, that the Child is a “sleepwalker,” a person whose spirit can leave his or her sleeping body to possess the body of another person.
The villagers’ superstitious fear of spirits seems to reflect their belief that they exist at the mercy of nature and must abide by its seasons and changes. Ovid, on the other hand, comes from a Latin-speaking culture in which people believe they must dominate and control nature. This explains why Ovid doesn’t fear beastly spirits, since most of his life has been lived independent of nature and its forces.
Themes
Language, Perception, and Nature Theme Icon
Ovid spends hours sitting with the Child in the darkness of the hut, watching him. He seems to have none of the spirit he possessed in the wilderness, when Ovid felt they communicated without words. He is ugly, rather than beautiful as Ovid imagined the Child would be. Even so, Ovid feels a tender sympathy for for the boy and a need to “free him into some clearer body” and restore his human spirit. Ovid is not sure how to proceed. The first step ought to be showing the Child kindness, though the villagers have already ruined that approach. Ovid realizes that this task will fall only to him, since the women will not touch the Child and Lullo should be kept away from him.
Ovid’s desire to bring the Child from his natural state into human society, as well as his expectation that the Child should be beautiful rather than ugly, indicates that Ovid still views the world from his Latin-based perspective. Despite Ovid’s years in Tomis, he is clearly still influenced by traditional aesthetics and the belief that it’s more important for the Child to live in human society than to be free and happy.
Themes
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Childhood, Fate, and Identity Theme Icon
Weeks pass. Ovid lives in the same room with the Child, and the Child grows accustomed to his presence. The boy eats less timidly. Ovid begins to feel some sense of connection between them again. Normally, when Ovid bathes the Child, the boy does not seem to recognize that it is his body being touched. One day, however, he places his fingertip on the back of Ovid’s hand, feeling its texture. He withdraws it quickly. Ovid finds the encounter almost unnerving, and wonders if the Child has any real awareness of the shape and form of his own body.
The Child seems to lack self-awareness about his own body, which suggests that he doesn’t have the distinctive sense of self common to human beings. His mind appears to be dissociated from his body. When the Child touches the back of Ovid’s hand and then withdraws, the action signals his first steps toward recognizing his body as an extension of himself, of his conscious mind. Essentially, he becomes self-aware for the first time.
Themes
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Language, Perception, and Nature Theme Icon
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Within two weeks, Ovid senses an awakening intelligence in the Child. He starts to grow restless and watches curiously while Ovid writes on parchment. Ovid realizes that the Child experiments with his ink and parchment whenever he leaves the room, even trying to drink it. One day, Ovid steps out of the hut but watches from the doorway as the Child dips the stylus in the ink and scratches a line on the parchment, sticking his tongue out in concentration. The sight of such human striving brings tears to Ovid’s eyes—the “wild boy” is entering human tradition and society. Ovid leaves the Child untied from then on, sensing that he is now bound to the village and his fellow humans. Ovid leaves a colored ball for the Child to discover and possess as his own.
Drawing on paper represents another step in the Child’s developing self-awareness. Making a line on paper indicates that the Child is learning to project himself onto his environment by altering it, implying that he has some notion of himself to project. Possessing the ball represents yet another step toward self-awareness, since the Child must have an idea of himself before he can call something his own. Ovid thinks that these are markers of human society, suggesting that self-awareness, an individual’s sense that he or she is distinct from the rest of the world, is an innately human trait.
Themes
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Language, Perception, and Nature Theme Icon
Quotes
As Ovid reflects on how to help the Child, he finds himself reliving memories of his own childhood. As a “cynical metropolitan poet,” Ovid eliminated his childhood and his family’s rural farm from memory since they felt discordant with his adult identity. Now those images and sensations flood back, more vivid than ever. Ovid remembers playing with his brother and the slaves’ children, while the servants tend and bathe them. His mother is ill, so the nurses raise Ovid and his brother, caring for them and telling them stories about woodland spirits and demons. The memories bring new clarity and tenderness, and Ovid realizes that he wasted such a childhood by becoming a man of the city, while his brother “went another way, to death.”
Ovid’s feeling that he wasted his childhood experiences by going to the city suggests that his childhood set him on a kind of fated trajectory toward a certain lifestyle, which he refused to follow. Broadly, this suggests that one’s early years shape the rest of their life, forming the person that they ought to become. However, Ovid’s act of pushing such a childhood out of his mind to take on his “metropolitan” persona suggests that one may resist their fate and strive to become someone else.
Themes
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Ovid thinks about the days before his brother died. When his brother is 18, he falls seriously ill. Ovid sits by his side for hours at a time, nursing him. His brother is pious and dutiful, and Ovid secretly respects and envies him for it. However, Ovid accepts his “role as the frivolous one” and teases his brother, rather than emulating him. One evening, since his brother is ill, Ovid must perform a religious ceremony in his brother’s place. In his heart, Ovid feels that if he even momentarily feels sincere about the ritual, then it will be a sign to the gods (that he claims not to believe in) that he is replacing his brother, and his brother will die.
Ovid’s feeling that he must play his “role as the frivolous one” suggests that forces like fate or societal expectations can both positively and negatively impact a person, since these factors prevent Ovid from following his better impulses. His sense that believing in gods or rituals will kill his brother suggests that some part of him does believe, since if the gods truly don’t exist, Ovid would have nothing to fear.
Themes
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Childhood, Fate, and Identity Theme Icon
Quotes
Ovid goes out to the boundary stones of the farm, which for his brother mark the edges of the world, but for Ovid mark the beginning of it. He finds his father, who already completed his part of the ritual and gives Ovid a handful of ash and beanstalks to carry while leaping over heaps of straw. Ovid runs down the length of the field and, for only a moment, feels the joy of the ritual, of participating in the life of the farm. He realizes too late that he let belief take root in his mind—he killed his brother. Ovid feels guilty as he walks away from the field, back toward the house. He hears the mourning cries. Stooping to the ground, he covers himself in dirt, subconsciously “atoning for [the] moment of belief.”
Ovid and his brother’s differing feelings about the boundary stones’ meaning suggests two different perspectives: Ovid’s brother sees his world as his family, community, and the life he was born to, while Ovid sees his world as all that he can experience once he escapes his family and home environment. Ovid’s brother accepts his fate and identity, while Ovid tries to run from it. Ovid’s shame over killing his brother suggests that this childhood guilt fuels his rational skepticism as an adult, demonstrating how early experiences shape one’s behavior for years to come.
Themes
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Childhood, Fate, and Identity Theme Icon
Ovid reflects that one tries to hide from such moments for the rest of one’s life. He “killed something in [him]self on that night and tried to cover it with earth.” Ovid longs to speak to his father one last time, to tell him that he finally accepts where he came from. Ovid is “home.” Ovid wonders whether the Child will ever know who he should be since he doesn’t know where he came from. Or perhaps “not knowing make[s] him free.”
Ovid’s wish to tell his father that he accepts who he is suggests that Ovid not only killed his spiritual belief when his brother died, but also his sense of identity, derived from where he grew up and the family that raised him. Ovid’s fear that the Child won’t know who to be suggests that knowing one’s past is critical to understanding the present, but may also entrap them into a particular pattern or identity.
Themes
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Childhood, Fate, and Identity Theme Icon
Each morning, Ovid takes the Child out to the marshy land near the river, where they will not run into anyone else from the village. The boy carries the colored ball, his single possession, with him everywhere. Ovid tries to teach the Child how to speak, and in return the Child teaches him how to call out animal sounds. The Child can produce them so accurately that Ovid thinks he sees him transformed though the language, as if the Child briefly becomes “the creature itself.” Ovid sees that the Child produces the noises by contorting his face to imitate the shape of the animal, which helps him to understand how they make their call.
The Child’s love for the colored ball suggests that he now grasps the human concept of possession, for better or worse. Ovid’s feeling that the Child becomes whatever creature whose call he makes hints at the idea that  there is no real distinction between one being and another. To speak like a bird, the Child believes that he is the bird itself. This suggests that the language of nature involves extreme empathy, since such communication requires imagining oneself as someone else.
Themes
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Quotes
To teach the Child human sounds, Ovid puts the Child’s fingers against his own throat to feel the vibrations that human words make. Soon, the Child can imitate the vibrations himself. Ovid feels that when the Child makes a bird’s call, he is not simply mimicking but “being the bird.” Thus, by teaching the Child human sounds, Ovid hopes that he will become a man. “Speech is the essential,” Ovid believes. As the Child learns to make the vibrations that form words, he discovers his throat. As he learns to use his nostrils to make intonations, he discovers his nose. The boy discovers the features of his own face and then compares them to Ovid’s face, confirming for himself that they share their human likeness.
Ovid’s hope that by speaking human words, the Child will himself become human suggests that language is at the core of a person’s being and sense of self. This fits with Ovid’s early observation that the world looks different through Latin than it does through the language of Tomis. Within this frame, one’s language defines the way one sees oneself and relates to the surrounding world.
Themes
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Ovid teaches the Child to throw and catch the colored ball. The Child learns to smile on his own. As they walk, the Child uses hand signals to teach Ovid about all the different footprints and plants and insects in the forest. Ovid sees that this is the Child’s world, his “library” of knowledge stored over years in the same way that Ovid stores poems, philosophy, and laws. The Child leads Ovid into his natural world and his mind, but Ovid does not know how he will lead the Child into his own theoretical world.
Although Ovid set out to teach the Child his language, the Child is actually more of a teacher for Ovid, since his natural knowledge seems more relatable to life in Tomis than Ovid’s theoretical knowledge and poetry. Ovid’s recognition that nature is the Child’s “library” indicates that the Child is not any less intelligent or educated than Ovid, he merely possesses a different kind of information.
Themes
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Ovid decides he will teach the Child the language of Tomis, rather than Latin. In doing so, he knows he is deciding never to return to Rome. He will continue to write letters of petition to his attorney, asking for his exile to be absolved, but only because this is what society expects of him as an exile. Even if the Empire pardons him, he will not return. Ovid feels as if this life, in the wilderness beyond Roman society, is his true life, the one for which his childhood destined him. This is the life he tried to hide from with all his constructed identities and accomplishments. He belongs here.
Ovid’s choice to teach the Child the village language rather than Latin suggests that Latin, in its divisive and analytical nature, is less beneficial for life in Tomis. Additionally, Ovid’s decision to never return to Rome signifies his personal growth, since it suggests that he sees Tomis as his permanent home now. That decision also signifies that Ovid has accepted his fate and chosen to embrace his true identity.
Themes
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Language, Perception, and Nature Theme Icon
Childhood, Fate, and Identity Theme Icon
Ovid does not precisely know when his personal transformation began. The more he works with the Child, the more his own childhood appears to him, clearer than a memory, as if he is reliving it. Ovid realizes that the Child teaches him as much as he teaches the Child. They are moving in opposite directions along the same course. The Child envisions himself as the landscape and animals around him, struggling to maintain an idea of his individual self. Ovid is only an individual, and struggles to abandon his sense of self like the Child does. When it rains, Ovid tries to imitate the Child and think, “I am raining,” but his fear of losing his sense of self makes him panic. Ovid keeps trying, considering it his “final metamorphosis.” He wants to “let the universe in.”
Ovid’s desire to see himself as a part of the natural world conflicts with his desire to maintain his individualistic sense of self. This not only represents a conflict between two perspectives, but between the languages that form those perspectives. Latin, as a language that distinguishes and categorizes things, encourages Ovid to view himself as utterly distinct from the world. The Child’s natural language, by contrast, encourages the view that everything in the world is a unified whole, indistinguishable from one another.
Themes
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Language, Perception, and Nature Theme Icon
Quotes
As Ovid teaches the Child to form human words, the Child teaches Ovid to make bird sounds. Ovid thinks the Child is the better teacher. Sometimes the boy catches a bird and gives it to Ovid to hold in his hands, to feel, to imagine that he is the bird itself and share its being. Ovid closes his eyes, imagines growing a beak and wings, and makes small “piping” sounds. He thinks back to the days when he wished to know the language of the spiders and believes he is now getting close to it. The “true language” is that silence with which Ovid communicated with the Child in the forest, and during his own childhood. He no longer feels exiled from Rome, but from the universe itself and its universal language. Latin divides and distinguishes, but the Child’s language reconciles and unifies all things together.
Ovid’s ability to envision himself as the bird and make small “piping” calls suggests that he is beginning to understand the “true language.” Although this universal language remains a nebulous concept, the author suggests the “true language” exists by extending his argument that language shapes perception. The true language, presenting the universe as a reconciled whole, is simply an extension of the village language which points to the “unity of things,” as opposed to Latin, which divides and distinguishes.
Themes
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The air grows colder as the seasons change. The Child still prefers to be naked in the marsh, but seems to slow, as if he will soon hibernate like all the other animals in the woods. The villagers fortify Tomis for the winter, since soon the barbarians will ride across the frozen river and attack once again. Children bring the animals into the stockades. Soon, everyone will be huddled together in their winter huts. Ovid worries about the effect this will have on the Child, since they will have to share a room with the rest of Ryzak’s family. All year, Ovid and the Child have kept to themselves as much as possible, living in a ground-floor room.
The Child’s slowness suggests that he truly did hibernate in winters past, surviving by taking cover underground. The villagers’ preparations for winter parallel the preparation that many animals go through before winter as they stock up on food, make themselves a shelter, and prepare to lay dormant for most of the season. This reflects the villagers’ lifestyle which exists in tandem with nature, rather than trying to resist or control it.
Themes
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Quotes
Ovid shares his concern with Ryzak, but Ryzak assures him that the women will leave the Child alone. Ovid fears he is wrong, and suspects Ryzak wields less real authority than he pretends to. As a man, Ryzak embodies the law, but his mother embodies the dark spirits of the forest and the moonlight. There is a sense of power about her and the other older women that even Ryzak seems to fear.
This passage briefly explores gender as a minor motif, arguing that although men wield formal power through legal authority, women compensate by wielding greater, hidden power through their mysticism and spirituality. In this sense, the different spheres that men and women occupy in Tomis is similar to the difference between Ovid's more formal and sophisticated Latin versus the mysticism of the Child's language.
Themes
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Quotes
Ryzak’s mother, “the old woman,” remains antagonistic toward Ovid and the Child, though she will not practice witchcraft directly against them. Lullo, too, resents not only the Child, but Ovid, since Lullo is no longer the center of Ovid’s attention. Lullo’s mother—who is a foreigner, and whose husband, Ryzak’s son, is dead—fears the old woman as well, and so loosely allies herself with Ovid. In the close confines of winter, tensions within the household run high.
Ovid’s listing of crisscrossing tensions within the household hints that the winter indoors will be full of conflict. Although Ryzak’s mother hasn’t had a significant role in the story until now, she represents the only true antagonist in the story. This reiterates the old woman’s power, since she dominates her entire family through fear and witchcraft.
Themes
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The air feels still. The Child is restless all day, unable to focus, as if his something just beyond perception requires his attention. Ovid recognizes that the boy is often sensitive to changes in the weather. It will snow today, after three weeks of expectant waiting.
The Child’s self-identification with nature appears to attune him to the weather patterns as well, since he himself changes as the seasons change.
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Ovid wakes in the night and realizes that the Child is not in the hut with them. He finds the Child outside, standing under the falling snow, naked, letting it fall on his skin and rubbing it against his body, almost trance-like. When the Child notices Ovid, he whoops and shouts and frolics in the snow, bringing some to show Ovid. Ovid realizes that even naked in the cold, the Child’s body radiates heat. Ovid tries to bring the Child inside, but the boy begins howling like he did on the day the hunters captured him in the birchwoods.
The Child’s playfulness suggests that although he is far from frivolous, he maintains his ability to play and enjoy life, unlike the village women. Since Ovid argues that playing is a mark of freedom, the Child is arguably the freest character in the story, both self-sufficient (unlike Ovid) and joyful (unlike the villagers).
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When Ovid insists that the Child come inside, the boy lashes out and runs to the village walls, screaming and scratching at the wood as if he wants to climb it. He scratches at his own face. Ovid and Ryzak look on, saddened, while Lullo shakes with fear. Ovid feels heavy with guilt and a sense of the separation between him and the Child, since he cannot understand what it is that the Child is grieving. Eventually, the Child exhausts himself and lays on the ground, sobbing. Ovid carries him inside and sits next to him until the Child cries himself to sleep. In the morning, the Child never completely awakens and doesn’t seem to remember the night’s events.
The Child’s negative reaction to Ovid trying to bring him inside suggests that the Child will never be suited to the confines of human society, where he must live within walls and shelters. This negatively argues that human civilization is itself a form of entrapment that separates human beings from the natural world. However, Ovid, conditioned by his Latin language, seems unable to comprehend this.
Themes
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