A couple of these stories were pretty strange and I'm not sure I really understand them. One is "A Hand In The Grave." It's about two medical students who are told they have to supply a skeleton for class and don't want to pay for one. So they make arrangements with each other to dig up a corpse from the local graveyard and use that skeleton for class. While he's waiting for the time for him to meet his friend he is cursing the hour he decided to enter medical school. After they have dug down to the coffin of the corpse the first student decides he can't reach in the coffin to get the skull so he talks his friend into doing the deed. His friend is horrified when he thinks he's put his finger into the eye sockets. This makes them both decide that medical school is not for either of them and they finally leave the corpse where it's buried. Later they find out there are actually no corpses buried in this graveyard. It's was a wasteland belonging to a Turkist peasant who constructed earthen graves that were actually covers for small storage spaces where he kept his wheat and flour to keep them safe.
Norma and the Snowman was a nice little story about a volunteer. One of his comrades find a white rabbit one night almost frozen to death and he brings the rabbit into their tent to let it thaw out. At first I wondered if they were going to eat the rabbit, but they didn't. It thawed out and they let it go the next day. I think in a way the rabbit represents the freedom they all would like to have someday, and they seemed to experience it in that rabbit. Norma is the love of one soldiers life and is called the "juice lady." In the end she has decided that she will eventually join the volunteers soon also. It's nice to see that in the midst of so many horrors in the middle east there is still love and compassion for both people and animals.
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3 comments:
I like your sense of appreciation for the compassion of the characters in the last story. How does this image of "freedom fighters" contrast with what we see on the American news?
I thought the "A Hand In the Grave" was actually pretty humerous, but I agree that I didn't really understand the whole meaning of the story
I found Hand in the Grave very strange....but it did make me laugh, especially when he freaked out when he thought he had touched the eye sockets. I don't think he would have made it too far in med school. :)
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