Essay Questions

Provide a psychoanalytic assessment of Deo’s perception of danger.

Deo is unequivocally devastated by the war. Tracy Kidder expounds, “Only when he had entered the plane did he let himself look back, staring from inside the doorway as if from a hiding place again. In Deo's mind, there was danger everywhere. If his heightened sense of drama was an inborn trait, it had certainly been nourished. For months every situation had in fact been dangerous. Climbing the stairs a moment before, he had imagined a voice in his head telling him not to leave. But now he stared at the hills and he imagined that everything in Burundi was burning. Burundi had become hell.” Deo’s unconscious is overwhelmed with the horror of jeopardy. After beholding the hazardous aftermaths of warfare, his unconscious makes him to distinguish menace in all backgrounds include benign ones such as the plane. The imageries of the hellish Burundi governs his thought process because he has not overwhelmed war-linked distress.

Why does Tracy Kidder incorporate animal characters in Strength in What Remains?

Kidder writes, “He started walking. Looking around for a sign with a luggage symbol on it, he came to a corridor with a glassed-in wall. He glanced out, then stopped and stared. There were green fields out there in the distance, and on those fields cows were grazing. From this far away, they might have been his family's herd. His last images of cows were of murdered and suffering animals-decapitated cows and cows with their front legs chopped off, still alive and bellowing by the sides of the road to Bujumbura and even in Bujumbura. These cows looked so happy, just like the people around him.” The animal characters in Bujumbura are unfortunate because they are not discharged to the annihilation that the war initiates. Comparatively, in New York, the animals are secure and contented. The appraisal of the two classes of cows underscore that war is utterly unfavorable to all living creatures counting cows.