The Narrow Road to the Deep North

by Richard Flanagan

when he was a guard, he lived like an animal, he behaved as an animal, he understood as an animal, he thought as an animal. And he understood that such an animal was the only human thing he had ever been allowed to be. He was not ashamed at his discovery of his humanity in being an animal, only perplexed as to where it had led him. When his sentence of death by hanging was translated for him, he bore it like an animal, without understanding but with a dull awareness that he had had his freedom and now his end had come. The judge’s candle-wick eyes had looked down at him with flickering flames, and he had looked up with eyes he knew were dead already; and he had shaken his head back and forth and he had felt something large and terrible come down on him. He had wanted to ask about his fifty yen, but said nothing, and now he once more found himself pacing his cell, looking for a way he might escape. But there was none, and there never had been.