'The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing' Reading Response

       The book "The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing" has a lot of interesting ideas concerning the way that people learn and perceive the world around them. The majority of the story is a narrative from Octavian himself; but has some letters, signs and other forms of written information pertaining to Octavian's life, and one can see his story from several angles and identify the bias and opinions of many of the characters. He is brought up by a group of scientists and he is basically an experiment and doesn't realize it for many years of this life, thinking that all of the abnormal occurances that would tell one that they were part of an experiment, was normal. This story really questions how people know about the world, which is almost all from their childhood, and Octavian's situation makes a person wonder how much knowledge and personal opinion is from one's upbringing and how much is from personality.
       The author fabricates this story and the basis of the main character's life in order to show how people really think. There are several different examples of this throughout the story such as when the "no words can tell the agitation of my spirits occasioned by merely the thought of throwing open that portal and beholding the secrets of the gloomy closet within. Consider that on the door itself was pasted my visage, open-mouthed, above crossed bones. I fancied that, should I be discovered, I should be caged and tortured like the animals in the experimental chambers, burning compounds applied to my skin, incisions made near my eyes." This creates an extremely vivid picture of what the main character can see right before he enters the room, which contains the explanation of why he is there, and of the experiment's existance. He never contemplated going through that door until one of the servants mentioned to him a particular fact concerning the information that he and his mother were sold into bondage in the house, unlike what he'd thought.
     Another point that the author was trying to prove was the irony of many of the classical opinions and arts that exist in the world and that there were so many opinions of slavery that Octavian constantly heard and misconceptions he was taught by the household that until he was told to look, he didn't see the awful effects of slavery on the world, that he would one day experience. At one point in the book, he is listening to an opera that seems to prove just this point. "So the Incan woman retired to a galleon arm-in-arm with her Spaniard, singing that the chains of slavery were sweet when bound with the chains of love, while her people were engulfed in magma." shortly after this performance, Octavian and his mother perform in an act entitled, Air for the African Slaves. Octavian is not particularly bothered by this until he gets treated in an awful way as a slave years later and he contemplates what it meant to him in his youth.
       The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing is structured in an interesting way because the book describes the events during the American Revolution and the world from the point of view of Octavian, but he never describes the politics or details of what actually happened and instead describes the details of the physical events, leaving the reader to figure out the meaning of the events in the bigger picture of history. This book makes us think not only about how we ourselves learn but also how others will think of today's events in a much different way than we do and the future political effects of everything that happens now. Octavian Nothing grows up thinking that his life in an experiment is normal and anyone would probably think the same thing.