Silence Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 5 Summary: Chapter 5

Rodrigues is dragged through the village toward prison. Rodrigues tries to imagine himself as a heroic Biblical figure but just ends up feeling disillusioned. He can’t understand how the guards around him are acting so nonchalantly and others are peacefully going on with their lives. The guards lead him to a small hut, where Rodrigues finds other Christians being held in shackles. A man with one eye, Juan, asks Rodrigues what happened to him. A woman, Monica, offers Rodrigues a cucumber she takes from her breast with her manacled wrists. Rodrigues catches himself thinking about how they are ignorant animals, unaware their death lies ahead.

A samurai enters the hut, the same one who arrived in Tomogi to take hostages. The samurai greets the peasants warmly and tells them he doesn’t want to harm them but that they must renounce Christianity. Toward Rodrigues, the guard takes a more hostile demeanor. He tells Rodrigues to stay behind with him. The samurai tells Rodrigues that he doesn’t intend to kill him since that only makes Christians more stubborn. Instead, he says, they plan to torture the people Rodrigues just met on his behalf.

Rodrigues returns to the hut, regretting that he hasn’t had a moment to say a prayer for those who have been martyred. A man comes into his cell, another samurai. This samurai, however, speaks Portuguese. The man tells him he’s an interpreter. He attended a Jesuit seminary in Japan not to become a Christian but to increase his power. The Interpreter bitterly recalls how one Jesuit, Father Cabral, had nothing but contempt for the Japanese and ridiculed them, no matter how learned they were.

The Interpreter and Rodrigues engage in religious dialogue. The Interpreter argues that Christians don’t understand Buddhism. He says Christians believe in the error that buddhas are just human beings, because they cannot accept that men might have an exalted spiritual nature, as the Buddhists do; to Christians, this is reserved for Jesus and God alone. Furthermore, he says, Christianity is simply not needed in Japan. As Rodrigues argues with the Interpreter, he realizes that the Interpreter has engaged in this same dialogue many times. The Interpreter finally gives Rodrigues an ultimatum: If he doesn’t renounce, the prisoners will be suspended upside down and bled out to die. To make matters worse, the Interpreter reveals that Inoue used this same torture on Rodrigues’s beloved teacher, Ferreira, and that Ferreira is indeed alive, has taken a Japanese name and wife, and lives in Nagasaki. Stunned, Rodrigues finds his faith even more shaken.

Rodrigues is again dragged through several villages toward another prison. Onlookers deride him and give him cruel looks. Rodrigues, weary, keeps trudging on. During a moment of rest, someone offers him a bowl of rice. When he looks up, Rodrigues is shocked to see it is Kichijiro. He wonders why Kichijiro keeps following him. Rodrigues thinks bitterly of Kichijiro’s betrayal but accepts the rice, too tired to do anything else.

Analysis: Chapter 5

In Chapter 5, the narration shifts back to the third person. Rodrigues’s title is now considered priest and he is referred to by his role rather than his specific name. With Rodrigues’s firsthand perspective now pushed back into a more secondary role in the narration, the reader is given a more objective perspective that includes a wider range of characters’ motivations and feelings. Rodrigues is now a representative figure, a stand-in for the perspective of the Catholic Church, rather than the sole voice speaking for the political, religious, and social problems described in the novel.

Almost immediately, readers are given a clearer view of Rodrigues’s inner motivations and feelings. Rodrigues is disappointed that his captive walk through the village is much less of a dramatic, glorious affair than he imagined it would be. As he passes by, he is unnerved by the peace and calm of the people, who only take note of him briefly before resuming chattering among themselves. He even notices that the sun falls happily on the bushes and grows annoyed at how insects are going about their business nonchalantly. Rodrigues becomes disillusioned with his capture, the day he looked forward to for so long, for having failed to live up to his expectations of grandeur. Through the narrator’s description, Rodrigues is described as just one part of the landscape, barely causing a stir among the crowds. His sense of self-importance is at odds with the world around him, signifying how his heroic status is much more of an illusion than a reality.

Rodrigues is also revealed to harbor much more problematic prejudices of Japanese peasants than shown in his letters. He finds the One-Eyed Man’s questions about what happened to him naive and the way the prisoners look at him to be repulsive. He calls them “ignorant beasts” who do not know of the fate approaching them. The narrator describes how the peasant prisoners fawn over Rodrigues for speaking well but says they don’t really comprehend what he’s saying. This demonstrates the dissonance between East and West and further underlines the idea running through the novel that the lack of understanding between the East and West goes far beyond just a language barrier.

The interactions between the samurai and Rodrigues further underline this point. The Interpreter tries to explain to Rodrigues that there are fundamental differences in the concept of reality between Buddhism and Christianity. Buddhists simply do not have a concept of a living god roaming the earth like Christ, but rather believe in the divine capability of human beings at large. The Interpreter has had much more experience with this problem than Rodrigues, who has only stepped foot in Japan recently. Furthermore, the samurai are kind—something that confuses Rodrigues. He’s only heard the stories about Inoue’s gruesome tortures, but now he sees how the samurai are much calmer in temperament and not overly violent. Like the tales he’s read about martyrdom, what he’s heard about Buddhists’ excessive cruelty doesn’t align with what he sees.

Rather, the problem in Japan for the Buddhist samurai in power seems to be a more pragmatic one than a religious one. As the Interpreter explains, those in power don’t have an issue with Christianity per se, but rather the way it interferes with their rule over the peasants. They have more of a challenge with the priests, whom they see as the root of the problem, which they want to root out. On the other side of the issue, however, as the novel demonstrates, is the question of the oppressive qualities of the samurai’s rule. As described by Rodrigues earlier in the novel in his letters, the samurai exact harsh taxes on the peasants, who barely eke out a living. And, of course, the samurai’s forms of torture are cruel, and they have no qualm using the peasants as collateral to get the priests to apostatize. The novel presents a complex picture of the political and religious issues plaguing Japan in the seventeenth century.

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