Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The Mind of War
As I was reading one of Arrow's chapters in The Cellist of Sarajevo, I could not help but connect to a film I saw, Jarhead. In the movie Jarhead, the main character is a sniper in the Gulf War. While in training, he shoots at targets for hours, but longs to see the "pink mist" appear. (He wants to kill the enemy.) In The Cellist of Sarajevo, Arrow is a sniper, but she has trouble dealing with the notion that she might have to pull the trigger on the enemy. Shooting at targets does not require as much mental and emotional strength as shooting at the enemy does. The sniper in Jarhead has been interested in war his whole life, but war is interested in Arrow. Sometimes it is hard to work your way up to having the want for killing, sometimes you must attain it for your whole life.
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I think another thing is that Arrow doesn't want to be the person who has a want for killing; she just needs to defend her city. She says that the reason she hates the men on the hills is because they made her into a person capable of hate, and she is afraid that they will also make her a person capable of bloodlust. So, I think that she is unwilling to even try shooting at people not because she can't make herself want to kill, but because she doesn't want to be that person.
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