Choose a representative passage from this novel that holds particular significance to you. Type it in and comment on its significance.

“Together Kani and Mahaen had started a unique new legend on its way. Mainly through Kani’s genius, they had given a vastly more daring expression to an ancient ideal of the Sawi people, an ideal, which unnumbered generations of their forebears had conceived, systematized and perfected over millenniums of time. It was the ideal of using friendship to fatten one’s victims for slaughter, of finding comfort and delight in the misery and destruction of others. It was the ideal symbolized inadvertently by the occasional act of pillowing one’s head on the skull of a victim-even though the skulls of relatives were more commonly used in this way, simply because the skulls of cannibalized victims were too often covered with black char from the cooking fires used in their annihilation” (pg. 65).

This particular passage holds significance to me because this seems to represent the people nowadays. The Sawi culture may be more brutal and requires violence, but I think their beliefs are very similar to our culture. Related to the students, as the competition (academic success) among us is getting fierce, students tend to “pretend” as being friends to use the other classmates. Last year, my mom and I watched Documentary based on high school students, in TV, which introduced how students and parents are becoming aggressive and selfish in order to achieve better academic success than other students are. In school, the students may appear as best friends, but inside their hearts, they are already enemies who are willing to crush each other. The most impressive scene of the TV program was when a girl said “In order to win another smart students, after becoming a friend with him/her, you steal their notebooks and trash them, because a well-written notebook is like a student’s treasure.” It was such a surprising comment but still made sense. Nowadays, education has blinded the parents and students, which made them to do anything that might be beneficial to them. Even though our culture may be less violent than the Sawi culture, I do not see any huge difference between the two. Just as the Sawi expression, using friendship to fatten one’s victims for the slaughter was the way of finding comfort and delight in the misery and destruction of others.