I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too

The phrase “I am all the daughters of my father’s house, and all the brothers too” is a Shakespearean epigraph to “The Last Expeditionary,” introducing a chapter presented as an excerpt from Sara Fisher’s journal. Its paired images of daughters and brothers offer a language of kinship and shared identity before the journal turns to the practical realities of a group on the road.

Source and Placement

The line is attributed to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night and appears immediately before the heading for chapter fifty-six. The chapter is framed as material from The Book of Sara, presented at the Third Global Conference on the North American Quarantine Period at the University of New South Wales in the Indo-Australian Republic, April 16–21, 1003 A.V. The epigraph thus precedes a journal entry preserved and presented in a later scholarly setting.

Language and Resonance

The sentence joins “daughters” and “brothers” in a single first-person declaration. That inclusive formulation resonates with the journal’s collective perspective: Sara writes about a group sharing food, shelter, and the effort to find its way east. The text does not state that the epigraph refers to any particular member of the party or explain its intended meaning, so its connection remains suggestive rather than explicit.

Relation to the Journal Excerpt

The entry describes the party finding an orchard after going without enough food since Hollis shot a deer three days earlier. They gather small, wormy apples, which restore their full bellies despite the cramps that follow if they eat too many at once. That scene of shared scarcity gives the epigraph’s language of familial plurality a concrete narrative setting: the group’s survival depends on moving and provision together, while Sara’s journal makes their common circumstances part of a remembered record.