Joe Character Analysis

He wished the phone would stop ringing. It was bad enough to be sick let alone have a phone ring all night long.

“That’s not Bill. It may seem like it but it’s not.”

Where did they get that stuff about bombproof dugouts when a man in one of them could be hit so hard that the whole complicated business of his ears could be blown away leaving him deaf so deaf he couldn’t hear his own heart beat?

After the speech Lincoln Beechy looped the loop five times and left town. A couple months later his airplane fell into San Francisco Bay and Lincoln Beechy drowned.

They didn’t sleep very much. Sometimes they dozed off and awakened and found that they were apart and came back to each other and held one another tight very tight as if they had been lost forever and had just found each other all over again.

“It’s just like this. For fellows like you and me to be out her slaving our best years away on a section gang is just as if girls nice girls like Onie and Diane suddenly decided to become washerwomen.”

He couldn’t live like this because he would go crazy. But he couldn’t die because he couldn’t kill himself. If he could only breathe he could die. That was funny but true.

The guys from the mission came stinking of disinfectant and looking very bedraggled and embarrassed. They knew that anyone who smelled the disinfectant knew they were bums on charity. They didn’t like that and how could you blame them? They were always humble and when they were bright enough they worked hard.

He thought about it afterward. It didn’t matter whether the rat was gnawing on your buddy or a damned German it was all the same. Your real enemy was the rat and when you saw it there fat and well fed chewing on something that might be you why you went nuts.

He saw he had to do it. Because if he couldn’t tell being awake from being asleep why he couldn’t even consider himself a grown-up person.

He felt a little lump in his throat that even as he was deserting his father for Bill Harper his father had volunteered the rod.

Somebody said let’s go out and fight for liberty and so they went and got killed without ever once thinking about liberty. And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what?

There’s nothing noble about dying. Not even if you die for honor. Not even if you die the greatest hero the world ever saw.

He thought if I never have anything else I will always have dawn and morning sunlight.

Oh god the happy happy new year he had counted three hundred and sixty-five days and now it was new year’s eve.

American generals and English generals shook your hand but since he had no hand to shake maybe this was an Englishman or an American who had decided to follow the French custom because there was no other way to do it.

He felt change through the tips of her fingers and a sharp little twinge of disgust went through him but in spite of the disgust he was responding to the touch responding to the mercy in her heart that caused her to touch him so. Her hands sought out the far parts of his body. They inflamed his nerves with a kind of false passion that fled in little tremors along the surface of his skin.

He thought of the slaves who built the pyramids thousands of them tens of thousands of them spending their whole lives to put up a dead monument to a dead king. He thought of the slaves who fought each other in the Coliseum in Rome for the entertainment of big guys who sat in the boxes and held their thumbs up or down to give the slaves life or death.

Outside the crowds were yelling and the bands were playing and here he was with four or five guys in a quiet little room and they were playing blackjack when Christ came up from Tucson and walked in on them.

Now he understood. The old nurse had left to spend the christmas holidays away from him and this new nurse this young lovely beautiful understanding new nurse was wishing him merry christmas. He nodded back at her frantically and his nod meant merry christmas to you merry christmas oh a merry merry christmas.

The hotel manager looked out into the darkness and saw Mary’s white anxious face there. She’s a pretty kid he thought and scared too like her husband says. It’ll be an awful mess if she has a baby on the premises people who can’t afford them shouldn’t have babies anyway but what are you going to do about it?

What do you want?

Take me into your churches your great towering cathedrals that have to be rebuilt every fifty years because they are destroyed by war. Carry me in my glass box down the aisles where kings and priests and brides and children at their confirmation have gone so many times before to kiss a splinter of wood from a true cross on which was nailed the body of a man who was lucky enough to die.

Why didn’t they want him? Why were they shutting the lid of the coffin against him? Why didn’t they want him to speak? Why didn’t they want him to be seen? Why didn’t they want him to be free?

Make no mistake of it we will live. We will be alive and we will walk and talk and eat and sing and laugh and feel and love and bear our children in tranquility in security in decency in peace. You plan the wars you masters of men plan the wars and point the way and we will point the gun.