The Old Man And His Knot Analysis

I - The old man and his knot

- Firstly, the old man is described as a pelican in "His skin was shrunk up with wrinkles like a pelican’s empty pouch". The image of the pelican could be referenced to the religion because it was a symbol of christianity compared to the Christ.
- The most interesting here is the image of the gorian knot. The image of the knot refers to the sailors who needed knots for security. It is compulsory in a boat to naviguate correctly and calculate the speed. But here specifically it refers to a legend associated with Alexander the Great who was the one who undid the knot by cutting the cord with his sword. It is used as a metaphor for a problem difficult to solve but solved by using a brutal solution, so the old sailor has an intuition and he is knotting for someone else to undo it, he is implicitely telling Delano that there is a real issue on board (here the black rebellion) and that someone must find out and help them because the white men present on the ship can't speak
- According to the narrator he's also an old man looking "like an Egyptian priest, making Gordian knots for the temple of Ammon".
There are here multiple images : the Egyptian priest, the gordian knots and the temple of Ammon. the Egyptian priests were specialists of prayer and the cult of a god. They were not different from the other human beings. The biggest egyptian priests were located in the Temple of Ammon, Ammon being one of the principal divinity for the Egyptians.
Atufal, the black man who has just arrived on the scene tells Delano that the old man is simple-minded and likes to make jokes. He tries to persuade him that everything is