World War II

World War II is invoked as the recent past embodied in the weapon Wilkes uses to shoot Alice Pagett. The novel does not depict the war itself; instead, its reference gives the German Luger a history of violence that shadows the shooting at the shrine.

The War as a Historical Marker

During Alice’s levitation, Wilkes draws a German Luger concealed beneath his clothing and walks toward the platform. The narration identifies the pistol as a relic of World War II, recalling a conflict in which violence had spread across much of the world. The brief description places the weapon within a history larger than Wilkes’s immediate act, without supplying a more specific account of its origin or wartime use.

The Weapon and the Shooting

The war reference enters at the point when the pistol becomes visible and its danger immediate. While the congregation watches Alice rise, Wilkes approaches unnoticed, raises the Luger, and fires at her until the fifth of its eight bullets jams. The gun’s past and present violence meet in this scene: a weapon associated with an earlier global conflict is turned against a child at a religious gathering.

Narrative Significance

World War II functions here as a compressed historical comparison, not as a separate episode in the plot. The reference enlarges the scale of the shooting without making the two kinds of violence equivalent: the novel moves from the war’s broad history to Wilkes’s individual attack. By naming the gun as a relic, the narration also makes an otherwise concealed object carry a past into the scene, where it becomes the instrument of Alice’s apparent death and return to life.