« Watch me »
Satan« Watch me » is Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s October 1970 warning, a brief expression of defiance that the novel frames as confidence in his ability to prevail amid Canada’s national crisis. Its force comes from the contrast between the phrase’s clipped assurance and the personal and political failures gathering around him.
Political Context
The phrase appears as Trudeau faces two crises the narrative links: Canada’s national division and the breakdown of his marriage to Mary. One point of contention between them is her refusal to learn French, while Trudeau’s effort to unify the country through bilingualism is also described as unsuccessful. The marital conflict thus becomes an intimate counterpart to the larger national impasse.
Rhetorical Force and Narrative Function
The narrator places the warning beside an account of Trudeau’s education in the United States and England and his connection to the Rhodes scholars, presenting him as aligned with the power of the Anglo-Saxon empire. The phrase’s certainty anticipates the narrator’s claim that Trudeau had chosen the winning side of history and would remain there. In this context, “Watch me” reads less as a general boast than as a compressed assertion of confidence in political victory, even as the novel sets that assurance against the failures surrounding him.
