The narrator’s relationship with the corpulent major after his killing

The narrator’s relationship with the corpulent major after his killing is defined by the major’s return as a persistent and unsettling witness. Rather than ending with the major’s death, their connection continues through apparitions that taunt the unnamed narrator, intrude on his memories, and register the moral weight of events he would rather not face. The major is at once a ghostly companion and an accuser, making the narrator’s acknowledged act of killing impossible to leave behind.

The Major’s Return on the Mission

On the second night of the journey, the unnamed narrator experiences the terrain as unstable: his body seems to buck and heave, he cannot feel the ground, and the stars appear like snow trapped inside a globe. From beyond that imagined enclosure, the dead major and Sonny watch him and seem to shake it with their enormous hands. The apparition places the major beside Sonny as one of the dead who can still observe and unsettle the living. The narrator grips his rifle as an anchor, but the weapon cannot secure him against the experience of being watched.

The vision arrives amid the narrator’s thoughts about Lana and his regret that he did not tell the General about their encounter. Forest dampness recalls Lana to him, while fireflies and the surrounding darkness sharpen his sense of exposure. The major’s presence is therefore not an isolated ghost story: it enters a night already crowded by memories, desire, and the narrator’s search for paths into his own interior darkness. The dead major joins that inner landscape without explanation, remaining an external observer who makes the narrator’s private recollections feel witnessed.

The Grave and the Hole in the Head

The major’s haunting becomes more direct during the burial of the Affectless Lieutenant. After the lieutenant’s leg slips from the palm-leaf cape, the unnamed narrator must pick it up again and tuck it beneath the covering. As he helps return earth to the shallow grave, the major appears with his head protruding from the grave and asks what shape a ghost will take: whether the lieutenant will linger with one leg or two, or with worms emerging from his eyes. The question turns the burial’s brutal practicalities into a confrontation with the uncertain afterlife of the body.

The major then asks why he himself is still whole except for the hole in his head, rather than being reduced to a repellent mass of flesh and bone. His grotesque question makes his injury the mark of his death and gives his appearance a physical specificity, even as the scene leaves open whether he is a ghost, a hallucination, or an image produced by the unnamed narrator’s disturbed perception. The narrator cannot answer. He feels as though he, too, has a hole in his head, a likeness that binds the living man to the dead one through injury and mental disorientation. The burial does not resolve the major’s presence; it gives that presence another grave to speak from.

A Witness to Violence and Confession

The major also appears within the unnamed narrator’s recollection of the sexual assault of the Communist female agent. As the policemen take turns assaulting her, the major covers his eyes and cannot bear to look. His reaction distinguishes him, in that moment, from the men inflicting violence, although the scene does not erase his own history as a man the narrator killed. The major remains part of the narrator’s witnessing consciousness: even the dead are present when the narrator confronts what he saw and failed to prevent.

Later, during interrogation, the Commandant and the commissar weigh the unnamed narrator’s deeds against the agent’s injuries. When the Commandant dismisses the lives of Sonny and the major as less than the agent’s suffering, both dead men pause in their agitation to listen. The major’s presence here gives him a place in the argument over how the narrator’s actions should be judged. His death is not treated as a self-contained incident; it becomes one of the lives counted, discounted, and contested in the narrator’s confession.

The narrator distinguishes between acknowledging that he killed Sonny and the major and confessing those killings as crimes. In the Commandant’s eyes, the killings are not the offenses for which he is being reeducated. That distinction does not make the major disappear. Instead, the narrative repeatedly restores him as a witness at the very moments when official judgment tries to assign value to his life and death. The major’s posthumous role is thus bound to the gap between what the unnamed narrator has done, what he can write, and what the authorities consider worth punishing.

The Major’s Final Applause

Near the end of the interrogation, the commissar asks what the unnamed narrator wants for himself. After answering first with happiness and then love, the narrator finally says that he wishes he were dead. Sonny and the major applaud. The gesture is strikingly different from the major’s earlier taunting questions: here, he seems to approve of a declaration that exposes the narrator’s despair rather than evade it. Yet the applause does not offer comfort or absolution. It confirms that the dead remain present as an audience for the narrator’s words.

Across these scenes, the relationship changes from the narrator’s experience of being watched, to a grotesque exchange beside a grave, to the major’s silent attendance at questions of violence and responsibility, and finally to apparent approval of the narrator’s death wish. The novel does not establish the major as an independent, reliably observable ghost; his appearances belong to the unnamed narrator’s account and are entangled with memory, trauma, and guilt. That uncertainty is central to their continuing relation. Killing the major has not ended the narrator’s connection to him: it has made the major a recurring figure through whom the narrator encounters the consequences, and the unresolved moral meaning, of the dead man’s life and death.