payment page
Chapter 11, The Canto of Ulysses
Summary
Levi has been admitted to the Chemical Kommando. The squad’s youngest member, Jean, has the position of Pikolo, or messenger-clerk, whose post entails cleaning their workspace, distributing tools, washing bowls, and recording the squad’s work hours. Jean asks Levi to help him with his daily chore of fetching the soup ration from the kitchen a half-mile away. On the walk, they chat about their homes, families, and books they have read.
Jean, who speaks French and German fluently, expresses a desire to learn Italian and Levi enthusiastically launches into the project then and there. As a vehicle for learning, Dante’s Divine Comedy immediately comes to Levi’s mind, specifically the visit to Ulysses in the Inferno section. In his limited French, Levi gives Jean background on the poem and then quotes from Ulysses’s soliloquy explaining why he sailed away from his wife and home on his long journey. Levi seizes on the idea of the open sea, anxious that Jean will appreciate the metaphor of freedom. Moving on in the soliloquy, Levi remembers like a thunderbolt Dante’s lines about man’s nature to seek after “knowledge and excellence.” Jean empathizes with Levi’s emotions even if he doesn’t understand the words. When Levi quotes Ulysses’s comment on the direction of his voyage “as pleased Another,” the verse resonates within Levi as a sense of divine destiny to their own lives in Auschwitz. Levi struggles to express this insight to Jean as they collect the soup. The kitchen announces the soup of the day as cabbage and turnip, interrupting Levi’s reverie. Then, Levi remembers the last line of Ulysses’s recounting of his voyage, “And over our heads, the hollow sea closed up.” The chapter closes with this nightmarish image.
Analysis
Levi develops a friendship with his colleague on the work squad, Jean. Jean’s emotional intelligence with people and multilingual communication gifts have ingratiated him to all their superiors. Levi again explores the theme of languages, as knowing more than one is an all-important survival skill. On the walk to pick up the soup ration, Levi responds to Jean’s idle wish to learn Italian as an urgent mission. Just as Virgil served as Dante’s guide as the two walked through the realm of Hell, Levi decides to guide Jean to learn Italian through the use of some poetry from Dante’s Inferno. His seemingly random choice of Ulysses’s soliloquy about his voyage reveals how Levi’s mind works, always making connections.
The remembered poem suddenly speaks powerfully to Levi of his situation in Auschwitz. In Dante’s Inferno, Ulysses says that men were born for higher pursuits than following their base appetites and that providence guides their journeys. The thought of a transcendent purpose operating in his life had not occurred to Levi until that moment, and he can barely contain his urgent need to tell Jean before it is too late and they both are dead. At that moment, however, the soup queue ritual interrupts his epiphany, and he once more finds himself back in the Lager “sea” in which he must swim or drown. The last line of the chapter provides a glimpse of how Levi is viewing his current reality.
