1943

The Moral Reckoning of 1943

The legacy of 1943 forces Sam into a profound moral crisis. The year's events, and the threat they spawned, push him to consider actions that revolt his nature. He tells Carol, "I've been up one side of this and down the other. I want to kill Cady." When she tries to dismiss it, he insists, "That was not a figure of speech. I mean that I want to plan it all out and lay a trap and kill him and dispose of the body. I want to commit murder, and I think I know how it can be done." Carol's response is chilling: "Not murder. Execution." The year 1943 has turned a lawyer who believes in the law into a man contemplating vigilante justice. He had earlier been offered a different path, a suggestion to hire thugs to beat Cady with bicycle chains, a "hospital job." The offer came with a warning from a man who had taken a professional beating himself: "It marks you through and through. It's the pain, I guess. And the way they won't stop. The way you hear yourself begging and they still won't stop. The guts and the pride run right out of you." Sam's journey from the witness of 1943 to the would-be executioner is the novel's central moral arc. When he finally kills Cady, he searches through himself for guilt, for a sense of shame, and finds only a sense of savage satisfaction, a feeling of strong and primitive fulfillment. All the neat and careful layers of civilized instincts and behavior were peeled back to reveal an intense exultation over the death of an enemy. The year 1943, which began with a young man's high-wild anger at a brutal crime, ends with that same man feeling a primitive fulfillment over the death of the criminal. The lesson Carol learns is that "everything we have is balanced on such a delicate web of incidence and coincidence." The year 1943 is the prime incidence, the coincidence that set everything in motion.