They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the face of a friend.
Death and the value of a human’s life are the main subjects discussed in the novel, and the narrator puts a great emphasis on the idea that no matter how brave a man is, in the end he will behave like a coward in the face of death. Men will abandon abstract notions like freedom and think about things that are familiar to them, simple things that have an important place in their lives.
“What's so noble about being dead?”
Death was often presented as being something noble, especially if a man died for the right cause. But Joe disagrees with the idea that death should be treated like a reward. Being near death, Joe was able to see for himself that the idea of dying was actually terrifying and a person would always think about what he would have still liked to do. Accepting the idea that death is noble goes against a human’s nature of running away from death and everything he can just to escape it. Because of this, Joe is reluctant to accept so easily the notion of dying for a cause, be it honorable or not.
“Of course a lot of guys were ashamed. Somebody said let's go out and fight for liberty and so they went out and got killed without ever once thinking of liberty. (…)What the hell does liberty mean anyhow? (…) No sir anybody who went out and got into the front line trenches to fight for liberty was a goddamn fool and the guy who got him there was a liar.”
Those who went to war were led to believe that they did so for the sake of liberty. While this was a strong enough reason to go to war in the beginning, when the men were near death, they didn’t think about honor or liberty but about their families and mundane things that were important for them. For Joe, liberty is hard to define because it can’t be pointed out and shown like a physical object and thus it is hard to properly say what liberty really is. Because of this reason, Joe questions the reasons why people still agree to risk their lives for something that can’t be defined and something that may not even exist in the form it is presented to them.
“Eleven years later. Numbers have dehumanized us. Over breakfast coffee we read of 40,000 American dead in Vietnam. Instead of vomiting, we reach for the toast. Our morning rush through crowded streets is not to cry murder but to hit that trough before somebody else gobbles our share.”
What Joe transmits through this quote is the idea that war dehumanizes us. If maybe 200 years ago, when a man heard about thousands of people dying would feel physically sick, now it is perceived as something normal. The image of people dying and being mutilated no longer affects us the way it used to. Now people continue living their lives without being affected by the fact that somewhere else, people are dying in horrible conditions. Joe noticed and important characteristic of the modern society and that it the fact that we detach ourselves from the events that don’t affect us directly.
