I'm really impressed at the amount of emotion Morrison can draw out of me. Guitar really infuriates me and draws out an argumentative side that's really not that conducive to interpreting the text. All of this crazy radical racism he's throwing out is just so ignorant, so strange and foreign an idea that I really don't like it. Here I go again, another rant against Guitar instead of a rant about the text.
I think the thing Morrison is trying to get across is how inescapable the cycle of violence is after it has begun. Yes, Guitar is going about his revenge, ahem, Justice, in a very savage way but the crimes that provoke such justice are just as savage themselves. As a reader I am appalled that Guitar doesn't even try to punish the perpetrators and simply picks at random but then i can't help myself from thinking
"Hey, yaknow, the black people we killed at random too."
I dunno, i found the emotion surprising.
Anyway, business.
"White people are unnatural. As a race they are unnatural. And it takes a strong effort of the will to overcome an unnatural enemy"(Morrison 156).
The thing I found most startling about this little tidbit of Guitar's rant was that he paired the idea with the whole Nazi thing. Guitar sits here and calls Whites unnatural and kills them indiscriminately then turns and uses Hitler to justify his actions.
It never occurs to him that people will indiscriminately kill his people and use him as a way to justify his actions.
Think how simple that is, eh? to keep that cycle of violence turning? One single death, justified or not could cause hundreds in that kind of environment and breed the hatred that could continue the killings for years and years to come.
Guitar kills because he claims whites are unnatural and the whites kill back because they claim his people are unnatural for killing indiscriminately which they do because... When, honestly, they are both as inhuman as those they are trying to kill and the only ones that are natural, that are human, are those innocents, those Emett Till's, that have no part in the blood shed beyond being the ones that shed the blood.
Monday, March 30, 2009
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment