Trauma and Self-Destruction Theme Analysis

He was a pleasant-looking boy, neither handsome nor plain, rather shy and in no way remarkable. I was interested in the fact though, so far as I could remember, he hadn’t said half a dozen words since entering the house, he seemed perfectly at ease and in a curious way appeared to take part in the conversation without opening his mouth.

“The dead look so terribly dead when they’re dead.”

“What do you mean exactly?” she asked, troubled.

“Just that.” He gave her a rueful smile. “You have a lot of time to think when you’re up in the air by yourself. You get odd ideas like that.”

“What sort of ideas?”

“Vague,” he said smiling. “Incoherent. Confused.”

Isabel thought this over for a while.

Don’t you think if you took a job they might sort themselves out and you’d know where you were?”

“I’ve thought of that. I had a notion that I might go to work with a carpenter or in a garage.”

“Oh, Larry, people would think you were crazy.”

“Would that matter?”

“To me, yes.”

“You think of a fellow who an hour before was so full of life and fun, and he’s lying dead; it’s all so cruel and so meaningless. It’s hard not to ask yourself what life is all about and whether there’s any sense to it or whether it’s all a tragic blunder of blind fate.”

“I wish I could make you see how much fuller the life I offer you is than anything you have a conception of. I wish I could make you see how exciting the life of the spirit is and how rich in experience. It’s illimitable. It’s such a happy life. There’s only one thing like it, when you’re up in a plane by yourself, high, high, and only infinity surrounds you. You feel such a sense of exhilaration that you wouldn’t exchange it for all the power and glory in the world.”

[…] “But Larry,” she interrupted him desperately, “don’t you see you’re asking something of me that I’m not fitted for, that I’m not interested in and don’t want to be interested in? How often have I got to repeat to you that I’m just an ordinary, normal girl.”

“It’s a long arduous road he’s starting to travel, but it may be that at the end of it he’ll find what he’s seeking.”

“What’s that?”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you? It seems to me that in what he said to you he indicated it pretty plainly. God. […] Unfortunately you don’t know what experience he had in the war that so profoundly moved him. I think it was some sudden shock for which he was unprepared. I suggest to you that whatever it was that happened to Larry filled him with a sense of the transiency of life, and an anguish to be sure that there was a compensation for the sin and sorrow of the world.”

“I got the idea somehow that he’d taken on the hard, brutal labor of the mine to mortify his flesh. I thought he hated the great uncouth body of his and wanted to torture it, and that his cheating and his bitterness and his cruelty were the revolt of his will against—oh, I don’t know what you’d call it—against a deep-rooted instinct of holiness, against a desire for God that terrified and yet obsessed him.”

“Sophie wallows in the gutter because she likes it. Other women have lost their husbands and children. It wasn’t that that made her evil. Evil doesn’t spring from good. The evil was there always. When that motor accident broke her defenses it set her free to be herself. Don’t waste your pity on her; she’s now at heart what she always has been.”

“The idea came to me when Uncle Elliott made all that fuss about this damned Polish liqueur. I thought it beastly, but I pretended it was the most wonderful stuff I’d ever tasted. I was certain that if [Sophie] got a chance she’d never have the strength to resist. That’s why I took her to the dress show. That’s why I offered to make her a present of her wedding dress. That day, when she was going to have the last fitting, I told Antoine I’d have the zubrovka [the Polish liqueur] after lunch and then I told him I was expecting a lady and to ask her to wait and offer her some coffee and to leave the liqueur in case she fancied a glass.”