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.