An unlikely guide
The encounter is not arranged for the Master's benefit. The Old Man has troubles of his own. He is frightened by the disorder, worried about family and eager for company in a city that has become dangerous. Graham's ignorance gives him an audience, and he begins to talk.
His account combines knowledge with vanity. He understands parts of the recent political struggle and the history of the Sleeper's estate. He also enjoys treating his own opinions as superior to those of the people around him. His disdain for ordinary workers is revealing, especially when his conversation touches on his own connections to their world.
Ostrog, in his telling, is an extraordinarily capable political figure. The Council has opponents with history, organisation and ambition. The uprising did not simply begin because a preserved man opened his eyes.
For Graham, even an argumentative explanation is valuable. The Old Man is not responsible for regulating his access to information. He speaks because he wants to speak, not because Howard has decided what the patient may safely hear.
Knowing the history, missing the person
When the conversation turns to the Sleeper, the Old Man becomes most confidently unreliable. He doubts that the original man could still exist. The figure presented to the population must be a substitute, an instrument produced for political purposes. Other rumours turn medical uncertainty into convenient explanations of the revolt.
Graham hears speculation about himself without being able to correct it merely by being present. The Old Man's theory is designed to explain a public story, not to recognise the private individual sitting beside him.
Beneath those errors, however, he provides information Graham desperately needs. He traces the growth of the estate and the transformation of its administrators into rulers. Suddenly the Council's behaviour, the secrecy and the crowd's expectations begin to fit together.
Graham eventually identifies himself. The revelation produces disbelief rather than reverence. To the Old Man, the stranger's claim is another absurdity in a night already full of them. Graham's ownership of an immense estate cannot compel a single person in the dark to accept his identity.
When Graham moves on, the Old Man wants him to stay. The encounter ends not with a wise mentor completing a lesson, but with a frightened citizen losing company.
Reading the record
The Old Man is useful because he is not an ideal source. History, prejudice, rumour and genuine insight arrive in the same voice. Reading the scene well means separating what his account helps explain from what the novel gives us reason to doubt.
He is also not a survivor of Graham's original century. His age does not bridge the whole 203-year interval. He knows the past through the society that inherited it, just as younger people do. Calling him a living witness to Graham's old world would erase the very problem the conversation exposes: public memory can preserve information while distorting the person at its centre.
The comic reversal matters politically. Graham has escaped institutions that knew exactly who he was but prevented him from acting. He now encounters someone who tells him useful things while refusing to know him at all. Authority and truth do not arrive together.
The record rewards a slower reading because its contradictions are the point. The Old Man can be wrong about the Sleeper and illuminating about the world. Graham can be the owner around whom the world's power has gathered and still be a lonely stranger who cannot make himself believed.