Slave Skundus and the Seven Sleepers

The passage that inspired me to do a reading reflection on this week’s reading was in A Deep Sleeper when Julius referred to the boy Tom as one of the “Seben Sleepers.” I had never heard of The Seven Sleepers but the way Julius referenced them made it sound like a well-known cultural story so I looked it up. Of course, the story of The Seven Sleepers does turn out to be a very well-known story that comes from Christian and Muslim legend about seven religious believers who went to sleep during a century when they were an oppressed minority and then, as a miracle, woke up in a new century when their religion was widely accepted.  It’s a clever joke for Julius to be referring to Tom as one of the sleepers in the story because it contrasts the miracle of divine 100 year sleep with the vice of supposedly lazy teen-aged drowsiness. The interesting thing about this reference in A Deep Sleeper is the way the legend parallels the story Julius tells. In the legend, the sleepers sleep in a time that they would not want to experience, in the same way Skundus went to sleep after his wife got sold to another plantation. In the legend, the sleepers woke up to a better world, the same way Skundus woke up to a time where his wife was back home. As part of the miracle, Skundus also got to be treated by doctors who decided that Skundus shouldn’t be worked too hard anymore, on account of his condition. If we look at Skundus’ narcolepsy through the interpretation of the Seven Sleepers legend, then we can conclude that Skundus’ “condition” is that he is blessed.