Thark Socially Cruel Order

Thark society is a communal order in which cruelty and emotional deprivation are sustained by custom, while combat provides a recognized route to rank and authority. Its paradox is that violence can earn public approval and political standing, yet the same system denies its members the love and sympathy that Sola longs for. John Carter’s treatment of animals and his defense of Tars Tarkas offer a pointed contrast: strength need not exclude care, and a leader’s worth can be measured against the community’s own standards of courage.

Custom, Status, and Public Approval

The Tharks’ response to John Carter’s unexpected feat shows how their social code turns combat into recognition. At first, the other Martians fall silent in astonishment; then they laugh and applaud. Carter does not initially understand the response as approval. Only later, after learning their customs, does he realize that their applause was an uncommon public commendation. The scene establishes that a display of prowess can win respect even when the observers’ reaction is difficult for an outsider to interpret.

That approval has a material and political dimension. Because Carter has killed a warrior, Thark custom gives him the dead man’s equipment and position, treating him as a conqueror. He comes to understand that he is, in this sense, a Martian chieftain, and that the rank helps explain the unusual freedom and tolerance he receives in the audience chamber. The episode presents a stark form of customary justice: status follows victory, and the rewards of combat shape how the community treats the victor afterward.

Violence and the Treatment of Animals

The same expectation of force governs the Tharks’ handling of their thoats. Carter acquires two animals from the warriors whose equipment he wears and learns to manage them as native riders do. Their method is to strike a thoat that does not promptly obey its rider’s telepathic instructions, repeating the punishment if the animal resists until it submits or throws the rider. The routine presents domination as an ordinary tool of control rather than an exceptional response.

Carter deliberately adopts another approach. Asked by Tars Tarkas how he has won the animals’ obedience, he answers that he has done so through kindness. He argues that gentler treatment serves practical ends as well as humane ones: on the march and in battle, he can trust the thoats to follow his commands, making him a more effective warrior. He recalls that Tars Tarkas himself had observed how the animals’ unpredictable tempers could turn a victory into defeat by unseating or attacking their riders at a critical moment. Carter’s argument does not reject the Tharks’ concern with fighting ability; it challenges their assumption that harshness is the best way to secure it.

This contrast gives the social order a measure of internal tension. Carter presents kindness not as weakness or withdrawal from combat, but as a method that improves reliability and benefits the community. The Thark norm of force remains visible in the comparison, yet his example makes room for care as a form of competence.

Sola’s History and the Cost of the Order

Sola’s account exposes what the Thark code costs in intimate life. She describes how Tars Tarkas heard Tal Hajus recount the fate of her mother without showing emotion. Even as Tal Hajus spoke with evident pleasure about the past, Tars Tarkas gave no outward sign of feeling. Sola interprets his later cruelty not as proof that he had never loved, but as a response to the horrors inflicted on the only person he had ever loved. She believes he still waits for the chance to take vengeance on Tal Hajus, nearly forty years after that love first transformed him.

After telling this history, Sola and Carter sit in silence: she absorbed in the past, he pitying those whom their people’s customs have condemned to lives without love, marked instead by cruelty and hate. The pause matters because the order is presented not only as a political arrangement but as an inheritance of emotional deprivation. Its effects endure in memory, shape how characters understand one another, and leave affection legible chiefly through what the society has suppressed.

Sola then entrusts Carter with the identity of her father: Tars Tarkas. She places no restriction on his use of the truth, trusting him to decide whether speaking or concealing it might spare someone suffering. Her confidence rests on her belief that he is not bound by inflexible truth-telling when a lie could protect others. That trust stands in contrast to the brutal customs she condemns: she sees in Carter the capacity to make a humane judgment where her society offers no reliable shelter for tenderness.

Escape, Friendship, and an Alternative Ethic

When Carter and Dejah Thoris plan an effort to escape, they invite Sola to join them rather than leave her behind. Carter recognizes that she rejects her people’s customs and offers the prospect of a home and protection among Dejah Thoris’s people. Dejah Thoris adds a more personal promise: among the red men of Helium, Sola could find affection and sympathy that her own society denies her. She also warns that Sola may face a terrible fate if the Tharks believe she helped the escape. Their appeal thus recognizes both Sola’s desire for a different life and the risk attached to acting against her community’s expectations.

Later, Tars Tarkas tells Carter that he can scarcely recognize him, but that no other person on Barsoom would have done what Carter did for him. He says he has learned that friendship exists. This recognition is significant within a society whose customs have made loyalty and tenderness difficult to express. It does not erase the past Sola has described; instead, it marks a change in what Tars Tarkas can acknowledge and what the relationship between the two men can mean.

The conflict over leadership brings the critique into public view. Carter challenges the Tharks’ mighty jeddak for failing to be present in the fighting while exercising power through attacks on the defenseless. He then points to Tars Tarkas as both a great warrior and a noble man, asking the assembled chieftains to accept him as Jeddak of Thark. The appeal uses the community’s own respect for bravery but enlarges its meaning: authority should belong not merely to the powerful, but to someone whose courage is joined to nobility. Thark society’s rules still govern the scene, yet Carter’s challenge makes those rules a ground on which a different standard of leadership can be argued.