Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Starship Troopers, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Militarism
Citizenship
Moral Decline and Discipline
Communism vs. Moral Individualism
Summary
Analysis
A few more recruits were flogged during training, but not many. Administrative punishment had to be cleared by Major Malloy, who was more likely to kick out recruits instead. Administrative flogging was almost a compliment, because it meant that the instructors still thought they could turn a recruit into a good solider. No one other than Johnnie got the maximum, which was five lashes.
Discipline serves to instruct those who will make good soldiers and citizens, so the M.I. doesn’t waste it on those who don’t demonstrate the right character, choosing to simply kick them out of the service. Citizenship is valuable, as Mr. Dubois has already asserted, and therefore the path to achieve it should be challenging.
Themes
There was one recruit who earned the death penalty, an episode that Johnnie recalls in a flashback. The crime takes place away from Camp, and the recruit is clearly unsuited for the Army. He deserted almost immediately after he arrived at basic training. And although desertion is one of the capital offenses, the Army doesn’t usually hang deserters unless they’ve done something else criminal, preferring to treat desertion as a “highly informal way of resigning.”
According to the way the Federation is organized, a successful career as a soldier is accepted as proof that one has the correct morality to be a good citizen. However, the success of this system depends on Federal Service accurately and quickly identifying individuals who won’t make good citizens. Deserters, by this logic, aren’t worth prosecuting, because they’ve both shown that they’re not citizen material and they’ve taken care of removing themselves. Dillinger’s crime and punishment are an example of this process; although his desertion isn’t taken seriously, his crimes certainly are.
Themes
The Army doesn’t waste time looking for deserters, because it’s made of volunteers, and no soldier wants to serve with others who aren’t fully committed. It’s better to have an empty space in the ranks than a man who feels like he’s been forced to serve. Many deserters eventually turn themselves in, receive their 50 lashes, and move on with their lives. It’s exhausting to be a fugitive when everyone else is a citizen or legal resident—even if the police aren’t looking for you.
Johnnie emphasizes that Federal Service is “fully voluntary,” but neither he nor any of the other characters who make similar claims (Mr. Dubois, Major Reid) fully acknowledge the incentive that citizenship may hold for some people. Because the book imagines that morally lax people are easy to spot—their behavior is obviously insubordinate (Hendrick) or criminal (Dillinger)—it imagines that people with bad intentions or poor character could volunteer, but it’s confident that they will show their true colors and be excluded. And this confidence is never challenged within the book.
Themes
But this recruit, N.L. Dillinger, didn’t turn himself in; he is caught and convicted by a local tribunal for murdering a “baby girl” named Barbara Anne Enthwaite. Because his identity papers show that he is an undischarged soldier and military law takes precedent over civil law, he’s returned to Camp Currie. Johnnie wonders why, since he doesn’t think that most people need a lesson to remind them not to murder innocent children. However, the recruits do learn an important lesson: “the M.I. take care of their own—no matter what.” Dillinger “belonged” to them, so they were responsible to clean up his mess.
Dillinger’s crimes, although they’re only hinted at, are dark, so his punishment serves a different purpose than Hendrick’s, which was meant to deter similar infractions. Johnnie takes it as a lesson about the way that troopers’ responsibility for each other applies to discipline as much as support. Johnnie feels responsibility for the stain of Dillinger’s mistakes even though he’s aware that he’s not to blame for his actions. This is the lesson he failed to learn when demoted in Chapter 5.
Themes
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The recruits wear their dress uniforms and slowly march to the parade grounds. Dillinger is marched out, stripped of his insignia and uniform, and hanged. No one faints or gets sick, although the mood is very subdued at dinner. In a way, Dillinger’s death is less shocking than Hendrick’s flogging had been, because his crimes were so heinous that no one could imagine being in his shoes. Johnnie doesn’t have any sympathy for Dillinger, just for the victim and her family. The regiment observes 30 days of mourning, because it has been disgraced by Dillinger’s actions, and they need to clean its reputation. They cover their colors with black and don’t sing on march or have the band at parade.
The execution is carried out with solemnity and military splendor. The dress uniforms—and by implication, the deeds and virtue—of the recruits contrast with Dillinger’s debased behavior and his relative nakedness. The group is responsible to discharge his guilt by publicly mourning Barbara Anne, even though they aren’t responsible for having harmed her in any way.
Themes
Johnnie remembers how he spent time wondering how to prevent similar crimes. Even though they are rare, one is too many. Dillinger had looked normal, and his behavior hadn’t raised any red flags during the recruitment process. Johnnie realizes that if criminals exist, at least capital punishment prevents them from repeating their crimes. If Dillinger understood what he was doing, he deserved to die. If he had been so crazy that he didn’t understand his actions, then he still deserved to die, because people shoot mad dogs. Even if insanity is an illness, Johnnie still only sees two possibilities: Dillinger couldn’t be cured and he was better off dead for everyone’s safety; or he could be cured but understanding what he’d done would have driven him to suicide. Regardless of how he approached it, Johnnie always arrived at the same result: Dillinger’s death.
Dillinger’s execution begins a period of soul-searching for Johnnie. Dillinger looked normal, so there must be limits on the assumption that bad character will always be evident. To comfort himself, Johnnie works out a multi-pronged defense of the death penalty. It’s a mark of both his own civic virtue, as defined by the book, and the limited nature of this virtue that Johnnie can’t imagine an outcome for Dillinger other than death. His assertion that Dillinger, understanding both what he’d done and that it was wrong, would have necessarily killed himself sounds certain, but it’s offered without any real evidence.
Themes
This reminded Johnnie of another conversation from History and Moral Philosophy. Mr. Dubois told the students about the late 20th century, when crimes like Dillinger’s were common, and law-abiding citizens didn’t dare go out at night for fear of being robbed, hurt, or killed by gangs of children. Murder, addiction, and criminality were widespread. Johnnie couldn’t imagine this, so he asked why they didn’t have police. Mr. Dubois explained that they did have vastly overworked police and court systems.
The execution also provides Johnnie an opportunity to better understand some of the lessons he’d been taught in History and Moral Philosophy class. Claiming that crimes like Dillinger’s were common in the 20th century is another dig at contemporary society at the time that the book was written. The book imagines that mid-century trends were paving the way for utter chaos and lawlessness because the system of policing and punishment wasn’t effectively addressing the root of the problem.
Themes
Johnnie was still confused. He knew that if a child did something wrong in his city, both the boy and his father would be publicly flogged. Mr. Dubois began to consider the history of the “juvenile delinquent,” which he declared a “contradiction in terms.” As an example, he asked how any of the students who ever raised a puppy had housebroken it. When Johnnie’s puppy made mistakes, he wasn’t angry at it, because it hadn’t known any better, yet he still scolded it, stuck its nose in its mess, and “paddled” it. He had to make it think he was mad to teach it.
In Johnnie’s world, punishment is corporal (flogging), public, and communal—when minors commit crimes, the adults who should have taught them the correct way to behave are also held responsible, and the adults and children are punished together. Mr. Dubois introduces another one of his "common-sense" examples. Although the puppy-training story provides a feeling that his views are commonsensical or natural, it also prevents critical analysis or counterarguments. Fear and pain are necessary components to puppy training, so Mr. Dubois implies that they are also necessary and natural for teaching human beings right and wrong.
Themes
Mr. Dubois accused Johnnie of being a sadist for paddling a puppy that didn’t understand right and wrong. Frustrated, Johnny retorted that he had to: it’s the physical punishment itself that teaches the dog what’s expected. Mr. Dubois declares that he has raised many pups by the same method. He related the juvenile delinquents of the 20th century to these puppies: they were often caught and scolded, but their noses weren’t rubbed in it because laws demanded their names be kept out of the news. They also weren’t spanked—and many of them hadn’t even been spanked by their parents as children, due to a common belief that corporal punishment caused permanent psychic damage.
Mr. Dubois’s devil’s advocate position and his use of Socratic questioning (using directed questions to expose and unravel deeply held beliefs while leading a student to greater knowledge) contribute to a feeling that the arguments he's about to make for corporal punishment are unassailable. But he doesn’t support his appeals to nature with evidence that justifies the leap from puppies to children. Nevertheless, that’s just the connection that Mr. Dubois makes when he claims that 20th-century children were failed by a system that didn’t punish them with enough physical pain or social shame to change their behavior.
Themes
Corporal punishment was also forbidden in twentieth-century schools, and flogging was regarded as a “cruel and unusual punishment.” Mr. Dubois couldn’t understand the objections to such punishments; suffering is a necessary part of punishment and pain is a basic mechanism by which evolution has kept individual organisms safe. Likewise, a punishment must be unusual enough to be significant and notable enough to deter potential criminals.
Mr. Dubois directly attacks a key ideal of 20th- and 21st-century democracies; his words are drawn from the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution. And while he begins by making an argument about corporal punishment in schools, he seems to deliberately misunderstand the “cruel and unusual” designation by claiming that 20th-century people found all suffering to be cruel. His claim—that punishment must be painful because pain is an evolutionary mechanism for keeping organisms safe—supports subsequent discussions of punishment and violence later in the book, and seems to clearly state the book’s stance on corporal punishment generally.
Themes
Mr. Dubois explained the usual sequence of a juvenile delinquent: this person hadn’t been spanked as a child, so he committed minor offenses. He was scolded about these. At worst, he’d be confined with other criminals, which only allowed him to learn more “criminal habits.” For many years, his only punishment would be “dull but comfortable” terms in jail, until one day he turned 18 and suddenly would find himself tried as an adult, awaiting execution for murder.
Mr. Dubois offers further supports for the corporal punishment that the Terran Federation endorses when he claims that the juvenile delinquents of the past weren’t spanked by their parents and their crimes were met with little real deterrence. This contributes, too, to the book’s criticism of 20th-century social norms insofar as they were moving away from corporal and public punishment. Mr. Dubois makes a case here that painful punishment is kinder than no punishment, because it has the potential to teach proper behavior before it’s too late.
Themes
Returning to the example of the puppy, Mr. Dubois asked Johnnie what would have happened if he’d scolded his puppy without punishment until he realized it was an adult dog that still made messes in the house and shot it dead. Johnnie answered that an owner would be at fault for raising a dog in such a way. Another student asked why parents hadn’t spanked their kids in the past. Mr. Dubois pinned the blame on a class of people—“social workers” and “child psychologists”—who found corporal punishment unappealing. The student answered that she didn’t like being spanked but was relieved to know that her parents’ discipline would keep her from someday committing serious crimes.
Continuing his extended analogy, Mr. Dubois relates the juvenile delinquent back to the puppy. It’s evident to the students that killing the adult dog is crazy; its owner would be at fault for failing to train it properly. This common-sense argument seems to prove Mr. Dubois’s point that failure to effectively use discipline to teach proper behavior is cruel. He therefore dismisses the complaints of psychologists and social workers that physical punishment of children was cruel or inappropriate, indicting the softness and moral decay that, in the book’s worldview, characterized the 20th century.
Themes
Mr. Dubois assured the students that the failure of 20th-century society was that it lacked a scientific theory of morals and assumed that human beings have a moral instinct. According to Mr. Dubois, people acquire moral sense through discipline and training. Moral sense, in his definition, is an extension of the survival instinct. While at its most basic level the survival instinct protects the individual, it can be cultivated into more complex forms. Concern for the survival of one’s family or nation can only be scientifically rooted in the individual’s survival instinct. Johnnie and his peers were living in a society that had a scientific theory of morals and could solve any moral problem, even among different species.
Mr. Dubois claims here that the futuristic society of the Terran Federation has discovered a scientific theory of morals based in evolutionary theory. In contrast, 20th-century people assumed that humans have a moral instinct. This mistake led to chaos and crime. While Mr. Dubois’s argument is founded in the scientific theories of evolution and survival of the fittest, there is room to critique his application of it to the realm of morals, which draws on the theory of Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism claims that individuals and societies compete for resources and power in ways that will allow the best and most able groups to rise to the top. Notably, here and in later chapters, the book’s theories of evolutionary-based human morality are discussed as scientific truths, although their proof lies outside of the book’s discussion.
Themes
Juvenile delinquents of past centuries only had their survival instinct, and their morality ended at loyalty to their gangs. Any “do-gooders” that appealed to their better natures were bound to fail, as these delinquents hadn’t had the opportunity to develop a more advanced moral sense. Duty is the foundation of morality. The delinquent children weren’t taught duty but were incorrectly told they had “rights.” The idea of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” being “unalienable rights” is a poetic fiction. Death means that life isn’t a right; the patriots who wrote the Declaration of Independence bought their liberty with war; and by their nature, human beings pursue happiness.
According to Mr. Dubois’s theory of evolutionary morality, a sense of duty and strict, painful discipline are the means by which an individual’s prioritization of his or her own survival can be transformed into concern for the group. His critique of 20th-century social decay rests on the difference between understanding that a person has a duty to his society and believing that the society owes a person rights, as the Declaration of Independence proposes. Not only are unearned rights valueless (recalling Mr. Dubois’s demonstration with the unearned first-place ribbon in Chapter 6), but the so-called “rights” valued in 20th-century democracy aren’t even things that a government could promise its people.
Themes
Turning back to Johnnie, Mr. Dubois explained that “juvenile delinquent” was a contradiction in terms because duty is an adult virtue. In fact, one becomes an adult only when he or she understands and embraces duty as more precious than self-interest. For every so-called juvenile delinquent in the 20th century, there were adults who had failed their duty.
In concluding the lesson, Mr. Dubois connects the dots between virtue and corporal, public discipline: strict discipline and training are necessary to mold a child’s selfish instincts into adult virtue. The corollary is that children aren’t fully responsible for their actions, since they still need training, and this belief undergirds the sense of responsibility Zim and Frankel feel for Hendrick in Chapters 5 and 6. If he doesn’t know how to behave himself yet, it’s because his teachers haven’t succeeded in teaching him discipline.
Themes
Wondering how Mr. Dubois would have classified Dillinger, Johnnie now comforts himself with the thought that, regardless of whether he was a pitiable juvenile criminal or a reprehensible adult delinquent, he wouldn’t be able to kill any more little girls.
As his flashback ends, Johnnie’s not sure if Dillinger should be pitied as a child for his inability to behave or held in contempt as an adult delinquent who understands what he should not do but does it anyway. Regardless, Dillinger’s punishment leaves Johnnie with a sense that—even if it’s not possible to predict and prevent every crime—the disciplinary regime of his society will adequately train most people to avoid delinquency as children and will swiftly deal with adult delinquents, keeping him and everyone else almost completely safe.
Themes
