So, I was reading ‘Blind’ this evening for class tomorrow. I came to the part (on pages 73-74 of my version… but I’ve got a weird version) where the nurse is “happy” and thinking that the hospital was “the second battlefield” where “The battle is going on over the helpless bodies of these men. It is we who are doing the fighting now, with their real enemies.” This paragraph was really interesting in general, which I’ll get back to in a bit, but when I read this, I immediately thought back to ‘Moonlight’ and the personification of Pain, Life, and Death. The “real enemies” in question for the nurse in ‘Blind’ seem to me to be Pain, while the battle is the battle between Pain and Life discussed at length in ‘Moonlight’. I just thought that was an interesting connection, seeing that bit of personification of pain implied through the ‘Blind’ nurse’s mention of a battle with enemies, mirroring the extensive personification of Pain in ‘Moonlight’.
Back to ‘Blind’ in general. I found it so very interesting how resolutely the nurse was thinking of anything except the wounded men. She says, right off the bat, “it didn’t do to think.” When she thinks, she risks getting overwhelming. Instead, she just needs to do her work. Tell how fast the men will die, but don’t get emotionally attached in any of them as individuals. The whole section about how the hospital functions and what her job is, and again how they’re the “second battlefield”, shows to me how much she can think about her work without really Thinking About It. This seems like a perfectly reasonable response to the traumatic nature of her job, to me. When you’re seeing men die, young men, often before they can receive any treatment, it’s natural that your brain will shut off the emotions and Thinking About It part of your brain and you’ll think about anything else. Whatever keeps you going.
The second battlefield is a really cool abstraction of the nurse’s job in the war, that I think is reflected in more than these two sections of the book. I agree that the enemies referred to are an interpretation of the character Pain, though I am not sure why there wasn’t just one enemy. The narrator takes on this post-death divinity in order to fight that pain, leaving the humanity of caring about the patients behind. My next thought was about the other characters and their roles in the second battle. Who are the old ones that bring in the subjects of the second war and arrange them? The surgeon is far better equipped with the weapons of Life, but also shows and instructs the nurse to wield Death in the form of morphine for some that they decide too far gone. Are they servants of Life, or judges, or do they (as I said earlier) instead serve Death, or serve none but aim to remove Pain?
yeah I got that happiness too in the most uncanny valley way. I mean who the hell enjoys the simple life of boiling needles???? I myself would be mortified as someone who hats needle shots! Anyway I think by this point of the collection/anthology/novel yeah I think we are getting that rejection from the protagonist. Rejextionof actual thinking but rather mindlessly doing stuff, doing the “routine” doing the “hot coco rituaral” everything! Blind is alos one of the longer
sooo….I mean…fun stuff, brain is so dead inside for that passage…
I definitely thought that these points make great connections between “Moonlight” and “Blind.” It is interesting that the nurse says that it is a second battlefield. I do agree since whereas men are fighting other men on the battlefield, now they are fighting against actual death. It makes sense that she would dissociate from her job because I don’t think nurses can function if they let each death affect them. It’s kind of like how people say that when you feel bad about something, fixating and spiralling usually makes things worse. I think we all know that she still cares about her patients. I feel like nurses can’t have the mental capacity to let each death cause an extremely emotional reaction since it would affect how efficiently they work on patients. I feel like patients would also become more anxious if they started seeing nurses panicking.