“All around them were the bodies of dead Chinese soldiers. They lined the verges of the roads and floated in the canals, jammed together around the pillars of the bridges. In the trenches between the burial mounds hundreds of dead soldiers sat side by side with their heads against the torn earth, as if they had fallen asleep together in a deep dream of war.”
This quote demonstrates the stark reality of war that Jim is beginning to realize, and was thrown into far too early. The bodies surrounding Jim illustrate the horrid brutality, savagery of war. J.G Ballard also draws a rather eerie comparison with the dead bodies, saying it is almost as they are sleeping, adding a whole new dimension to this already disturbing scene.
“After a few minutes Jim was forced to admit that he could recognize none of the constellations. Like everything else since the war, the sky was in a state of change."
Here, Jim is further realizing how not only his world, but everyone else's as well, has been turned completely upside-down by the war. Just as the night sky is in a constant "state of change", the war has transformed Jim's life from a slew of everyday tasks to perpetually shifting, entirely unpredictable, events.
“The dead were buried above ground, the loose soil heaped around them. The heavy rains of the monsoon months softened the mounds, so that they formed outlines of the bodies within them, as if this small cemetery beside the military airfield were doing its best to resurrect a few of the millions who had died in the war. Here and there an arm or a foot protruded from the graves, the limbs of restless sleepers struggling beneath their brown quilts.”
Again the comparison is drawn between death and sleeping; the author uses stark imagery to portray a very haunting scene: the mounds of bodies buried in the dirt, the thousands of dead people whose lives have been extinguished, most unwillingly, as indicated with the jutting limbs of "restless sleepers", because of the war.
