Babel-17 Part 4: The Butcher, the Man With No 'I'

Part 4 of Babel-17 is called “The Butcher.” It’s the shortest section of the whole book. Three brief chapters. But it hits the hardest.

This is where Delany stops playing around and delivers the philosophical gut punch the entire novel has been building toward. What happens when a language removes the word “I”? What happens to the person speaking it?

Chapter I: Something Is Wrong

The chapter opens with a quick radio exchange. The crew has just left the pirate ship. Someone checks in on Rydra and the Butcher. Are they okay? Are they drunk?

Rydra answers strangely. “The brain fine. The body fine.” Not “I’m fine.” The brain. The body. Like she’s talking about objects, not herself.

The Butcher is even stranger. When asked if he has anything to say, he responds: “What is it to say?” Not “what should I say” or “I don’t know what to say.” There’s no “I” in his sentence at all.

Ron picks up on it immediately. Something is wrong with both of them. But the chapter ends without explanation.

It’s a tiny chapter, maybe a page. But read it again slowly. Delany is showing you what Babel-17 does to people through their speech patterns. Rydra has started dropping personal pronouns. She’s been learning this language, and it’s changing how she talks. How she thinks.

Chapter II: Inside the Butcher’s Mind

This is the big one. The centerpiece of the entire novel, honestly.

Rydra and the Butcher are now in some kind of telepathic connection. Their minds are fused together. And through this fusion, Rydra finally understands what it means to think in Babel-17 without any concept of “I.”

She realizes something terrible. She had told Brass earlier that the Butcher must speak a language with no word for “I,” but she didn’t know which one. Now she sees it. Babel-17 itself is that language. The obvious one, right in front of her.

Through their mental link, she sees his memories. And they are brutal.

She watches him starve in solitary confinement at Titin prison. She watches him checkmate a casino’s computer in seven moves, win a million credits, then fight his way out when they try to kill him. She watches all of it unfold with this strange quality. His emotions are there, but they have no center. No “I” to anchor them. Delany calls them “ego-less and inarticulate, magic, seductive, mythical.”

Then Rydra asks the obvious question. If you understood Babel-17 all along, if you could use it to win at gambling and pull off bank robberies, why did you always lose everything the next day? Why didn’t you keep anything for yourself?

And the Butcher answers: “What self? There was no I.”

That single line is one of the most powerful moments in science fiction. Let me say it again. He couldn’t keep things for himself because the concept of a “self” that could own things did not exist in his language. Not that he didn’t want to. He literally could not form the thought.

The Mind Fusion

What follows is this incredible, almost psychedelic sequence where Rydra and the Butcher experience each other’s minds from the inside.

The Butcher sees Rydra’s poet mind and is overwhelmed. He calls it bright, burning, full of patterns. She connects the word “poet” to its Greek origin, “maker or builder,” and that single connection sends a shockwave through him. Because in Babel-17, words don’t carry those kinds of historical echoes. Everything is precise, analytical, now. There’s no depth of accumulated meaning.

She shows him Baudelaire and Villon, the old French poets who were also criminals. The connection between the artistic consciousness and the criminal consciousness sharing one head with one language. He can barely handle it. “Too bright!” he cries.

And then the flip side. He shows her his world. Murder, robbery, violence. Not because he was evil, but because the semantic difference between “mine” and “thine” was broken in his brain. The concepts of ownership, of property, of personal boundaries, all tangled in frayed synapses.

She watches him kill a woman named Lill on a swampy world. The scene is chilling. He drives her out to a romantic spot. She tries to seduce him while hiding a hypodermic needle. He breaks her neck. Carries her into the water. Calls his boss. “It’s finished.” Then he kills the boss two weeks later.

No guilt. No satisfaction. Just actions without a self to feel them.

What Rydra Learns

But here’s the twist. Rydra doesn’t just learn about the Butcher. She learns about herself.

“I’m a lot bigger than I thought I was, Butcher,” she says. She realizes she was afraid not because she couldn’t do what he does, but because she could. For her own reasons. With her own “I” intact, which makes it both better and worse.

They also discover something crucial. Those broken circuit boards on the ship. The sabotage that happened through Rydra’s own console. Of course. Babel-17 doesn’t just remove the “I” from the Butcher. It creates a kind of split in anyone who learns it. A part of you that acts without self-awareness. Without “I.”

The Butcher says they can control these sabotage forces if they can name them. But first they need to name themselves. And he doesn’t know who he is.

Chapter III: Arrival and Instructions

The last chapter is another short one. They arrive at headquarters. But now Rydra and the Butcher are both speaking in that strange, self-less way.

Rydra gives orders to the crew, but in third person. “The crew will debark with the Captain and the Butcher.” Not “we will” or “I want you to.” The crew. The Captain. Objects, not people.

The Butcher instructs the Slug to send a tape recording to Dr. Markus T’mwarba on Earth. A grammar of Babel-17. This is the next piece of the puzzle.

Ron freaks out. “Something’s wrong up there!” He’s right. Both of them are talking like machines. Like computers running Babel-17 instead of people speaking English.

Why This Part Matters So Much

Part 4 is only a few pages long. But it’s the heart of the whole book.

Delany wrote this in 1966. Decades before the internet made us think about how language shapes reality. Before social media algorithms showed us that the words we use affect what we believe. Before AI chatbots made us ask what intelligence even means without consciousness.

The Butcher is the living proof of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis taken to its extreme. Remove “I” from a language, and you remove the concept of self. Without self, you can’t have morality. You can’t have ownership. You can’t have guilt. You can’t have love, not really. You can have skill, intelligence, action. But no person behind them.

Think about it from a programming angle. Babel-17 is like a perfectly designed programming language. It’s analytically perfect. But it has no concept of the user. There’s no self-reference. The program runs beautifully, but nobody is home.

And what Rydra does, what she begins to do in this section, is add “I” back into the equation. She teaches the Butcher words like “I” and “you.” She builds bridges between the analytical power of Babel-17 and the messy, imprecise, absolutely necessary concept of selfhood.

It’s one of the most beautiful ideas in all of science fiction. Language doesn’t just describe who we are. It creates who we are. And without the right words, we might not be anyone at all.

Tomorrow we move into Part 5 and meet the man whose name appears in the title: Markus T’mwarba. Things are about to get resolved. But this section, the Butcher’s section, is the one I’ll remember longest.

This is post 15 of 19 in the Babel-17 retelling series.

Previous: Part 3, Ch 5: What Rydra Found Next: Part 5, Ch 1-2: Markus T’Mwarba