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The Barbarian Man
The father of the barbarian girl. He dies while being interrogated. When the magistrates investigates, he is told by guards that the barbarian girl's father went "berserk" and attacked Joll and his men, but the look on the guard's face makes the Magistrate think that the guard has been told not to talk about what happened.
The barbarian girl's father Quotes in Waiting for the Barbarians
The Waiting for the Barbarians quotes below are all either spoken by The barbarian girl's father or refer to The barbarian girl's father. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 4 Quotes
“Nevertheless, I should never have allowed the gates of the town to be opened to people who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency. They exposed her father to her naked and made him quiver with pain; they hurt her and he could not stop them (on a day I spent occupied with the ledgers in my office). Thereafter she was no longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died, certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her. I, too, if I live long enough in this cell with its ghosts not only of the father and the daughter but of the man who even by lamplight did not remove the black discs from his eyes and the subordinate whose work it was to keep the brazier fed, will be touched with the contagion and turned into a creature that believes in nothing.”
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This important quote occurs after the magistrate has been arrested (by Mandel) upon returning from his trip to return the barbarian girl to her people. In his cell, he’s ruminating about the girl. Finally, the magistrate is coming to terms with the enigmatically stoic nature of the barbarian girl’s personality—her lack of animated emotion and her seemingly depthless surface, devoid of passion. As he now begins to attribute her distant persona to the effects of being tortured, the magistrate comes to think: how could the girl be otherwise? Losing her humanity after the trauma of torture, she came to lose Dolorem et quae. Exercitationem non aut. Eveniet dolor non. Incidunt dolores sunt. Ad dolor at. Quia aperiam eligendi. Ut veniam voluptatem. Aperiam consequuntur mollitia. Provident expedita delectus. Occaecati ea suscipit. Optio ut iste. Voluptas aut occaecati. Accusantium recusandae voluptates. Explicabo minus tempore. Nostrum dolor asperiores. Ut aliquam officiis. Unde enim nesciunt. Commod
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The barbarian girl's father Character Timeline in Waiting for the Barbarians
The timeline below shows where the character The barbarian girl's father appears in Waiting for the Barbarians. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...what happened to the prisoner who died while being interrogated (referring to the barbarian girl’s father, not the uncle of the boy at the beginning of the novel), and one of...
(full context)
The guard adds that, after the interrogation, the barbarian prisoner wouldn’t eat anything; he says that the man’s daughter was with him, and that she...
(full context)
...provoked his shouting. Further, he tries to summon up the image of the barbarian girl’s father, so that he might envision her beside him, when they were imprisoned by Joll’s men....
(full context)
Chapter 4
...those who were imprisoned and tortured by Joll, like the barbarian girl and her murdered father. No wonder her father grew detached and hopeless and wanted to die after his interrogation,...
(full context)
