Early don’t mean much when you can’t sleep.
-- Emilio (Power)

Importance: What appears to be an off-hand comment from Emilio in fact functions as an early grappling with one of the concepts that governs the text: the way natural disaster and shifting methods of living can frustrate and interrupt one's sense of time. What Emilio means to say is that the storm has dispelled conventional senses of night and day and created such a threatening environment that sleep is no longer meaningful and the concept of "early" is irrelevant. This is a microcosmic instance of a phenomenon that later comes to govern the lives of the novel's characters: the disappearance of mechanical time altogether.

I saw.
-- Power (Lucas)

Importance: The haunting words that Lucas utters when asked what happened to his brother Flip speak to the shattering trauma he has experienced as well as the horror that lurks beneath The Light Pirate: the horror...