The monsters we carry in our hearts

“The monsters we carry in our hearts” is a recurring expression of moral horror, contrasting the visible threat of the dead with the inward burden of guilt, betrayal, and grief. It becomes most powerful through Captain Chen’s crisis, when military duty and personal love collide and the consequences can no longer be treated as an external enemy’s work.

Meaning and Context

The expression appears after Captain Chen has been transformed by the destruction surrounding his submarine force. His son, Commander Chen Zhi Xiao, had received his first command of a brand-new Type 95 hunter-killer, an achievement described as the happiest day of Captain Chen’s life. Captain Chen had raised him alone, taught him to be a good sailor, to love and serve the state, never to question orders, and to become the finest officer the Chinese navy had ever seen. Those ideals make the later conflict devastating: the values that shaped the son’s career also help create the circumstances in which father and son may stand on opposite sides of a lethal confrontation.

The Horror Within

The phrase is spoken after the crew hears the Type 95’s hull screech and its compartments collapse in rapid succession. The account describes the doomed crew as dying quickly and, perhaps, painlessly, but the emotional damage is not painless. The narrator watches the light disappear from Captain Chen’s eyes as the submarine is destroyed. The physical monster is therefore immediate and identifiable, while the inward monster is the knowledge that the destruction may have involved one’s own child.

Captain Chen had tried to avoid his own fleet because he knew which submarine had attacked them mattered. He had already betrayed his oath and homeland, and now faced the possibility that his betrayal had led him to murder his son. The expression gives this dilemma its final moral shape: the living carry responsibility, memory, and self-condemnation in ways the dead do not. The horror is not simply that a father may have killed his son, but that duty, obedience, and loyalty can make such an act imaginable to a person who once devoted his life to raising and serving him.

Physical Consequence of Guilt

The next morning, Captain Chen does not appear for first watch. When the narrator finds him in his cabin, he answers from the darkness, but steps into the light as a changed man. His hair has become white, his skin is sallow, and his eyes are sunken. He is described as truly old, broken, and withered. The change externalizes an inward collapse: guilt has become visible in the body.

The narrator places this human ruin beside the risen dead and judges the comparison in favor of the inward threat. The dead may be terrifying because they attack without ordinary human restraint, but Captain Chen’s suffering reveals another kind of monstrosity—what people can do, or believe they may have done, when obedience and affection are forced into conflict. The phrase thus works less as a supernatural claim than as an ethical reversal, redirecting attention from the battlefield to conscience.

Recurrence and Narrative Significance

After Captain Chen’s collapse, the submarine cuts all contact with the outside world and heads toward the Arctic ice, seeking the farthest, darkest, most desolate place available. The crew continues practical routines—maintaining the boat, growing food, schooling children, and raising and comforting them—but the captain’s loss of spirit drains the spirit of the Admiral Zheng’s crew as well. The narrator alone sees him during this period, delivering meals, collecting laundry, reporting the boat’s condition, and passing his orders to the crew. Routine continues, but it has become a shell around an unspoken wound.

The expression therefore links private guilt to collective consequences. Captain Chen’s inward torment does not remain confined to his cabin; it changes the morale, isolation, and daily structure of everyone aboard. It also prepares the later encounter with another Type 95, when the captain returns to the attack center, orders a firing solution, and prepares tubes one and two to fire before learning through the underwater telephone that the approaching submarine has peaceful intentions. The contrast between the captain’s readiness to destroy an unidentified enemy and the revelation that the voice belongs to Commander Chen Zhi Xiao makes the phrase a summary of the scene’s deepest fear: the most terrible enemy may be the one recognized only after the order to kill has already been made possible.