outcast: the necessity of the mace
The kestrel spoke around a beakful of chestnut: “I am Skarlath; I was alone, but you saved my life; now I am with you. Where come you from, friend?”
Scratching his golden stripe, the badger chewed thoughtfully. “I’m not sure. I think I had a mother, Bella or Bellen or something, it’s hard to remember. I must have been very young. Boar the Fighter, that’s a name I recall, maybe he was my father, or my grandsire, I’m not certain. Sometimes I dream about home, or maybe it’s my imagination, but it feels nice. Then there’s the mountain, was that my home? It is all very mixed up.”
Sunflash speaks about himself, excerpt from Chapter 2 of Outcast of Redwall
one of the reasons outcast differs from every other novel of redwall is in the fact veil, the titular character, does not even exist until the eighteenth chapter of the book. the previous seventeen chapters are spent building the rivalry between swartt sixclaw, the primary antagonist, and sunflash the mace, ascendant badger lord. though he may not have done so intentionally, mister jacques’ inclusion of the experience of sunflash allows us to draw comparable narrative lines with veil’s story. sunflash is fortunate to bear memories of his early childhood that become the lynchpin for his growth into a just, kind, and wise badger lord and friend. this foundational aspect of backstory, echoed more explicitly in the narrative of deyna in taggerung and rooted in current theories of psychology and human development, postulates that positive experiences with a parental guardian in early life are necessary for healthy growth and formation of the self. in future posts, we will weigh the differences between sunflash’s early childhood and veil’s early childhood; here, we will extrapolate what sunflash’s early memories imply about his childhood environment.
though his memories are certainly sparse, the tone and descriptive words sunflash uses to talk about his early childhood betray more about it than he is consciously aware of. he begins his reminisce with his mother: she is the largest figure in his memory as a baby. her name comes to his lips immediately, though when he presses against the fog of memories, he falters in his confidence. so much of the secure base of his babyhood has been eroded by the cruelty he experienced at the hands of swartt. bella likely spoke to sunflash of boar the fighter even before he could understand speech, sharing the legacy of their bloodline and imparting some of the sense of the destiny of badger lords to her son--whom she knew, even as he was a babe, he would one day take on that heavy mantle. perhaps boar even visited little sunflash in his early dreams, as is the mysterious power of some badger lords, which could explain sunflash’s vague sense of the existence of salamandastron. it is one of the latter lines of sunflash’s dialogue that gives us the most information about his formative environment. he dreams of his home and the emotions those dreams conjure for him are inherently positive. these dreams bring him comfort and they are totally unlike his reality at the mercy of swartt. “... it [thematic elements of home] feels nice.” what does “nice” mean for a baby? we can easily guess. there was safety. there was security. there was warmth. baby sunflash’s basic needs were met: he did not go hungry, somebeast tended to him when he cried, and he was groomed and cared for.
swartt tried his absolute damndest to beat any sense of personhood out of sunflash. swartt gave sunflash a degrading name, forced the young badger to commit acts lower than a slave, deprived sunflash of food and drink, and left him exposed to suffer the full effects of the weather. swartt did not succeed in breaking him because sunflash carried his verifiable sense of self borne out of the scant memories of his childhood. sunflash knew he had a benevolent mother figure. he knew he had a family history, the promise of having come from somewhere and something of any measure of meaning. he knows he had a home: a place where he was wanted, where he belonged. it was a place where he was safe, where his needs were met, and where his worth as a living creature was imparted. sunflash subconsciously knew that swartt could not truly define him.
veil, in strikingly direct contrast, was given none of these things.
