While Billy is at home, he takes his cousin out to the park
and is amazed by how energetic and innocent and entertaining he is. In this he thinks, “So this is what they
meant by the sanctity of life?” and
soon concludes that “there’s real power when words attach to actual
things. Made him want to sit right down
and weep as powerful as that. He got it,
yes he did, and when he came home for good he’d have to meditate on this, but
for now it was best to compartmentalize,
as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all” (83). There are two things happening in this
passage. First is the clear connection
between literature and conflict.
Concepts like war and injustice can only get so far into a person’s mind
without an image for the words to describe.
A person can hear about a genocide, but the feelings toward this
genocide will likely never be powerful enough to make the person act unless
this person sees the results personally.
While literature takes disconnected people a step closer to
understanding, there is still a limit as to how far it can take readers.
The second thing is much more personally geared toward
Billy. He is in the midst of actively
killing people for the sake of war when he gains full understanding of
“sanctity of life,” but because he will soon be back to killing, he forces
himself to push it aside, to stay slightly dehumanized and uncaring so that he
can continue his job as is expected of him.
This passage may be the clearest example of how war affects its
soldiers: they are forced to lose or ignore parts of themselves in order to
remain desensitized. They have to
compartmentalize their empathy toward others and their value on life, or, as
Billy said, “not to mentalize it at all.”
Sometimes, for a soldier, the best option is to completely forget about
the sanctity of life in order to retain personal sanity. One has to wonder, though, whether Billy will
be able to meditate on this later or if, by the deployment’s end, this part of
himself will be lost forever.
No comments:
Post a Comment