Something Interesting, blog for Tuesday

I found the slow progression of his realization about the full extent of his injuries to be interesting because it mirrored the slow formation of his opinions about the war and its effects upon him and his generation. As he realized how truly injured he was, he began to form a more concrete opinion about the war until he had decided it was a war that had forced many unwilling combatants to sacrifice their lives for what the “high up” people had deemed a worthy cause, but a cause that the true combatants felt no connection to. On another level, as he steadily became more aware of his increasingly worsening state, his opinions became more and more pessimistic. This led to him coming to the ultimately brutal conclusion that nothing was worth truly giving your life for because you would never be able to experience what you sacrificed for, a conclusion a man filled with depression could only draw. It seems to me that this would indicate the fact that Joe held no true love for anyone, because that is where a comparison to such a sacrifice can truly be drawn. Mothers say they will sacrifice themselves for their children. Loved ones will sacrifice for each other. If he views nothing as being worth a sacrifice then he never truly loved anything, making him a little less believable as a character.