Flowing from the three chapter parentheses examining the horrors of the carceral system, we return to Valjean as he sleeps in a real bed in the bishops home after what very well may have been the first humanizing contact he’s experienced in nineteen years.
The sobering reality is that a couple of hours of kindness does not magically undo the dehumanizing damage of nineteen years of terror at the hands of a violent and oppressive justice system. We find Valjean awake and unable to return to sleep, and in that state his mind returns to the silver. He thinks about where it’s kept and what it would take to get his hands on it. He thinks about the fact that it is worth twice what he “made” in his nineteen years in prison. He thinks about what it could mean for him as he seeks to leverage his deficient and illusory freedom to actually try and start over.
Will he steal this silver? Can we blame him if he does? When a system bends people this way, when they’ve been cast overboard, ground down to a powder, and left wearing a mark that brands them as “other” forever, can we expect them to follow the rules? What space is made for them?
I wish these were hypothetical questions. I wish this was an intellectual exercise that looked back at an unjust time we have left behind. On the contrary, it’s more pressing than ever, and the groups being attacked, bent, twisted and oppressed by the system are constantly growing in number while those that the system serves are an increasingly small but exceedingly powerful group that benefits from the destructive nature of everything happening. Where will it end? How do we stop it? Can we? I don’t know, and the gears of the system grind on while we all desperately try and avoid their teeth.