The commissar asks the narrator to shoot him

The commissar’s demand that the narrator shoot him is a turning point in the interrogation: an apparent offer of release becomes a test of whether the narrator can name what he wants and whether either friend can survive the camp. The pistol never fires. Instead, the commissar sets it down and leaves the narrator with a question that binds freedom to an answer he has not yet given.

Background and the Charge Against the Narrator

The confrontation follows the Commandant’s demand that the narrator explain what he did to his father. The narrator insists that he did nothing, then recalls having written to Man that he wished his father were dead. The Commandant treats that wish as evidence of guilt; the commissar adds the fact that an agent arranged the father’s killing, describing the death as a bullet in the head while the assassin confessed. The Commandant considers the father a colonialist and religious spokesman, and pauses to consider whether wanting his death could itself make the narrator guilty.

The scene thus turns on a distinction between causing an act and desiring it. The narrator had not arranged the assassination, but his written wish had been addressed to a revolutionary friend who understood the force of words and might act on what he wanted. Under interrogation, the narrator moves from denying responsibility to admitting that he wanted his father dead. That admission does not resolve his situation. It leads instead to a demand that he declare what he wants for himself.

The Demand and the Pistol

After the Commandant and the doctor leave, the commissar asks what is more precious than independence and freedom. The narrator first offers happiness, then love, before finally saying he does not know and wishing he were dead. Sonny and The crapulent major applaud; the commissar draws a pistol. The narrator imagines death as relief from a life that has hurt for too long, but the weapon does not become a means of his own death.

The commissar lowers the pistol, kneels beside the narrator, unties the sack and rope around his right hand, and places a Tokarev in it. The narrator’s hand bears the red mark of their brotherhood. He cannot hold the weapon upright without help, so the commissar wraps his fingers around the grip, steadies the barrel, and presses its muzzle between his own eyes. He asks the narrator to shoot him, saying that the narrator is the only one who can do it. The request reverses their familiar roles: the bound, exhausted prisoner is made the potential agent of death, while the commissar places himself in his friend’s power.

The narrator asks why. The commissar says that he can hardly bear to see him so afflicted, but cannot save him except by keeping him afflicted, because the Commandant will allow no other course. His own face has been so altered that the narrator recognizes him chiefly by his eyes, voice, and smile. The description of that smile floating in the void of his face makes the encounter at once intimate and estranged: the friend of the narrator’s youth remains legible through features that the present has almost erased.

A Test of Loyalty and Survival

The commissar explains that the Commandant will let the narrator leave only when he redeems himself. But the prospect of escape immediately widens beyond the two men. The narrator asks what will happen to Bon and says that if Bon cannot leave, he will not leave either. The commissar answers that they will both die there. He presses the gun against his own head more firmly, but says he is not asking the narrator to kill him because of his face; he would live, even if he could not bear his family seeing him in this condition.

The commissar’s plea makes the narrator’s choice inseparable from his loyalty to Bon. He says the narrator may yet save himself and their friend, while accepting that he himself may not be saved. This is not a completed sacrifice: the narrator cannot pull the weapon away or turn it on himself, and the commissar eventually releases his hand. The pistol falls to the cement floor. Sonny and The crapulent major, present as observers in the scene, stare at it as though they would shoot the narrator if they could, but they have no bodies with which to act. The commissar and narrator have bodies, yet neither fires.

The failed attempt is rendered as a grotesque, unstable comedy. The commissar laughs, then stops; the narrator cannot tell whether he has heard correctly and sees, or thinks he sees, sadness in the blankness of the commissar’s face. Laughter does not cancel the threat or make the request harmless. It marks the brief collapse of a scene in which the men possess a gun but cannot convert it into action, and in which apparent authority gives way to shared helplessness.

The Unanswered Question

The commissar apologizes for his weakness and explains the consequence he had nearly ignored: if he died, the narrator would die, and Bon would be taken before a firing squad. He holsters the pistol, ties the narrator’s freed hand down again, and restates the condition for release. The Commandant might let the narrator go because he wanted his father dead; the commissar will let him go only when he can answer the question about what is more precious than independence and freedom. He raises his hand in farewell, showing the red mark of their oath, and leaves.

His parting reassurance that he acts for the narrator’s own good is immediately undercut by Sonny and The crapulent major, who warn that such words can only mean something bad. The speakers then play a recording of a baby screaming. The narrator initially experiences the sound as present suffering, before realizing it is a tape; the recording continues the interrogation after the commissar has gone. The demand to shoot him therefore does not end the ordeal or secure release. It exposes the narrowness of the narrator’s apparent choices—confession, death, or an answer imposed as the price of freedom—while leaving the central question unresolved.

Significance

The episode makes political allegiance personal without making it simple. The narrator’s wish for his father’s death implicates him in an act he did not carry out; the commissar’s request asks him to enact another death in the name of friendship and possible rescue. Neither the language of revolutionary duty nor the visible bond between the men offers a clean way out. The narrator’s refusal to abandon Bon further complicates the prospect of individual survival.

The red mark on the narrator’s hand links the pistol scene to the brothers’ shared oath, but that bond cannot make either man capable of acting. The commissar can place the gun, guide the narrator’s grip, and ask; the narrator can hold it only with help. When the weapon falls, the episode leaves their relationship suspended between tenderness, coercion, and political necessity. The question about freedom persists after the commissar leaves, transformed from a slogan into a condition the narrator must confront if he hopes to leave with Bon.