#tnw

no sleep yet. i have confirmation for the thing i was thinking about. the explicit text regarding his encounter with the little kid in delhi tells you how to read the whole thing surrounding joseph hanna. in the first case he identifies with the child in his conscious thoughts (whether his monologue to him is something that actually happened or how his mind is feeding the memory back to him). explicitly like, i was exactly like you once etc. positioning himself as the one now in a position of power that gives him the ability to save that child. which is of course a fantasy, what he is is an imperial soldier and he gets the child killed just by existing in his vicinity. with hanna he doesn't/can't say it. except for when his answers to drax as to why he cares so much are found unsatisfactory

i have to say i did cringe a bit when drax said we ain't so different you and me or however he said it. but that might be fully up to cultural oversaturation

and do you think you have been reborn from the belly of a bear? well Actually assigning meaning to random events is the root of all suffering :) please stop making me participate in that! but he does have to participate in it, because there is simply no other option, has to participate in the assigning of meaning to all uncontrollable absurd things in both his own culture and the culture he briefly interacts with. this continues with his use of the bear knife later & with his staring at a dirty malnourished polar bear through bars at the berlin zoo with the camera doing the ye olde trick of shooting him like he's the one behind bars. involuntary identification with an animal, involunary narrativization of the pointless meat grinder :) misery for sumner for a million years