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Gambling
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Passion, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Passion represents war as the opposite of gambling: a human pastime that contains no risk and no surprise because it assures inevitable bad outcomes. It also suggests that war is incompatible with truth: it is a perverse form of storytelling that always leads to falsehood. One of the novel’s narrators, a young Frenchman named Henri, joins Napoleon Bonaparte’s army because he believes Napoleon’s promises that French conquest will ultimately end war and conflict, leading to a peaceful golden age. Yet after eight years with Napoleon’s army, Henri comes to realize that war promises not ultimate peace but always and only more war: conquered and defeated peoples inevitably resent and rise against their conquerors, so their conquerors always have to keep fighting to maintain their victories. He also comes to realize that while each individual human being is unique, war propagates the false story that people killed in war are fundamentally replaceable and that one’s enemies are subhuman monsters. In this way, The Passion paints a wholly negative picture of war as a human activity that allows for no progress, “cross[ing] out” the future and creating an eternal present of repetitive violence and mutual, false demonization between enemies.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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War ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of War appears in each part of The Passion. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
How often theme appears:
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War Quotes in The Passion
Below you will find the important quotes in The Passion related to the theme of War.
Part 1: The Emperor
Quotes
Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
“Will you kill people, Henri?”
I dropped down beside her. “Not people, Louise, just the enemy.”
“What is enemy?”
“Someone who’s not on your side.”
Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary.
Part 3: The Zero Winter
Quotes
You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.
And if you refuse?
If you felt for every man you murdered [. . .] madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted and the birds are silent.
Future. Crossed Out.
That’s what war does.
“They’re all different.”
“What?”
“Snowflakes. Think of that.”
I did think of that and I fell in love with her.
Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?
Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more.
Part 4: The Rock
Quotes
I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.
Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.
My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love.
The one is about you, the other about someone else.
