This chapter's epigraph is from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, "Poinsettia," in which the protagonist asks, "What is the point of living if you can't see the future?" In other words, the protagonist wants to be able to see the past, not the future. Poe's poem is about the future, and he wants to know what it will be like to live in the present. He asks the protagonist to imagine what it would be like if he were a human, and the protagonist replies that he would like to be a human. The protagonist then imagines that he is a human being, and that he has a dream in which he is an earthworm man. He imagines himself as an earthworm, and then he imagines his dream as a man who has a sword and a gun, and who has the power