The Word, Slave

Before I began to read the Slave Dr.Sexson told us that one good paper topic might be explaining why the novel was entitled, the Slave. I thought about this and decided I would try to investigate this notion. So upon beginning to read the novel I had a pencil by my side and every on every occasion I saw the word "slave" I underlined it. I was surprised to see that the word did not appear as often as I thought it would, perhaps less than two dozen times. I have yet to total these numbers up. However just recently as I was looking over my markings in the book. I noticed an interesting pattern emerging. I feel that Jacob never ceases to be a slave at any point in the story, he merely becomes a different kind of slave. Another notion I started to pick up on during this process was how Jacob's life in this book is very similar to a Dark Romantic Quest. For my capstone with Dr. Morgan this is the major theme we are dealing with as it occurs in texts such as the Hobbit, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and Harry Potter. In any case the quest has several elements that I found to exist in Jacob's journey in the course of the novel. One being that the quest must be an impossible one, one where the quester would not succeed without the intervention of a supernatural force. Another aspect is overcoming death, or in Jacob's case a great loss. The most important element of the Dark Romantic Quest, is the sense of inevitable and irreplaceable loss that characterizes the end of the journey. I have found all of these elements or at least similar comparisons in the novel, and I feel my paper will be about one of these two ideas, either the word the slave or Jacob's quest as a Dark Romantic manifestation.