Against Regulations

Joe has finally been heard. In this chapter, Joe gets a new nurse. When she comes in she unbuttons his shirt and traces “Merry Christmas” on his chest. He nods that he understands, and Joe and the nurse start to communicate by head nods on Joe’s part. The woman goes off to get someone who knows Morse code, and when she comes back with a man, all he codes is, “What do you want?”
Joe is really taken aback by this question. Well, of course whatever material object they give him he would have no use for. And the only thing that he wants is his arms and legs back, but the man knows that is impossible, so Joe thinks the question was mean and cruel.
We already know how anti-war Joe is, so he decides to be used as an educational tool. He wants to be shown as an example of how bad war is. He wants to bring the war to people and show them how gruesome it is, and what they are really fighting for. Joe wants to show everyone his body because he wants to spread awareness about the war that most people don’t know because they don’t hear about it in newspapers.
The man leaves and then comes back and says that what Joe wants is against regulations. Joe doesn’t know why they would deny him something so important to a man in his condition, but then he realizes that it isn’t really “against regulations.”
They just want to hide him. They want him to be a body that they are keeping alive, but they don’t want him to be a person. They don’t want him to think for himself. At the end, they are sedating him again and they won’t let him communicate anymore.
Joe wanted to show people how bad war is, and they want to hide the truth. If men knew about Joe, they wouldn’t want to be in the war.

Christ

When Joe is sedated, he has a dream about Christ. The dream relates to his earlier memory of the train station when he went off to war. There was a woman calling for her son and saying that he did not belong in the war, he was only sixteen years old. Joe sees the woman’s son, and he realizes that he is Christ.
Joe is in the train station and sits by while a group of men are playing cards. The men all sitting in the train station have something in common: they are all going to die in the war. They play cards and discuss their deaths, and Christ joins them and proves that he is Christ by making whiskey appear for the men.
One man playing cards points out Joe and pretty much said that he doesn’t belong there because he is not going to die. But, Joe tells the men about his fate. He is just the stub of a man with no arms or legs, no face, and no way to communicate with others. That shuts the other men up and they agree that being Joe is worse than being dead.
The men all get on the train, and Christ leaves because he has other dying men to see. Joe feels like he does not belong on the train, so he gets off. By getting off the train he puts himself in a place where he is neither alive nor dead. Joe finds Christ and cries at his feet asking for mercy.

Morse Code

One day when Joe is in his hospital room, he feels the presence of a few male visitors. They touched him and set something heavy on his chest. They kissed his temples. Joe figured that they were generals from the war, coming to reward him with a medal. At first, he feels slightly honored, but then he starts to feel very angry. He feels almost cheated. He thinks about how the generals just go around giving medals, and they never fight. They never have to put their lives in danger. The soldiers in the war died and fought for their lives and Joe said that no generals ever got injured in war and he could only think of one who had died.
In his fury, he starts thrashing in his bed, trying to make the bed cover fall off of him so the generals could see his body. While he is thrashing his body, he feels his throat vibrating. Joe knows this is a noise that the other people can hear.
Because Joe has lost all of his senses besides touch, he depends on vibrations to feel footsteps. He realizes that if he can understand what’s going on through receiving vibrations, he can give off vibrations to communicate to others.
Joe starts tapping because he finds a way to communicate to others. He knows Morse code from when he used to type messages to his best friend, Bill Harper, on rainy days. So, he taps his head to Morse code. He gives off the message “SOS” to his nurse whenever she comes in, but she does not understand he is trying to communicate with her.

Time

It is said that when a person loses one sense, their other senses are heightened. In Joe’s case, he has lost all but one of his senses. He has no mouth, ears, or nose. All he has is the sense of touch. But, even then he does not have any hands to touch with, so he has to play a passive role. Something has to touch him, and then he can use his sense of touch to wrap his head around it.
So, with only the sense of touch, he figures out a way to keep time. He waits to feel the warmth of the sun on his skin from the window when the sun comes up. Then, he knows it is dawn. The first time he every figures this out, he says it is January 1st. Even though it is not the first day of the year, it is a way to keep everything in order.
Joe says, “If you can keep track of time you can get a hold on yourself and keep yourself in the world but if you lose it why then you are lost too. The last thing that ties in wit other people is gone and you are all alone.” Joe knows that he is very alone, and realizes that time is the only thing that connects us and keeps us together. Everybody goes by the same time. Joe plays a very passive role, because he can’t get up and do anything. He can’t do anything about how he feels. He can’t communicate with others and there’s no way to fix him. Mastering time was a way for Joe to take control of himself for himself.

Worth Fighting For

Joe believes that nothing is worth fighting for. He goes on a tangent about how nothing is worth more than your life. He thinks that if you lose your life, the thing you were fighting for wasn’t worth it. Recruiters always drop the words democracy, independence, and liberty. But Joe says they are just words, and why fight for words? If people fight, they should fight for their loved ones, but not to the their death.
When someone is going to die, they think about their family and friends, not about how they won’t die in vain because they are fighting for something. Joe says that it’s not cowardly to not want to die.
The only thing that Joe thinks is worth fighting for is one’s own life. If you fight for a cause, but die during the fight, you will never get to have the benefits of the win, because you’re dead. He thinks about how men who go to war don’t really know what they are fighting for. Joe wants just one perfect answer of why to go to war, and he can’t find one. He wants to know the reason to go to war, so he can see if he’s gained it. Joe considers him as close to death as one can get, and he has lost so much. He wants to know what he has gained.

Rat

In these chapters, Joe feels that there is a rat eating at one of his open sores. He remembers when he was in the war, he and his fellow soldiers found the body of an enemy soldier. He had been dead for weeks, and there was a rat eating the face of the body. Joe and the soldiers chased away the rat and killed it. He had come up with the conclusion that the enemy was not the other soldiers but the rat.
In reality, he is actually dreaming this but he can’t figure out whether it is a dream or really happening. Joe figures that if he can feel the nurse cleaning and bandaging his wounds, and he can feel the rat gnawing on his wound, they both must be really happening. He feels there is nothing he can do to stop the rat, because he doesn’t have any arms or legs. He becomes restless because he can’t do anything about it and he continues to fall in and out of consciousness.
Like most of his nightmares before, Joe is comforted that he could calm himself down by waking up and opening his eyes. He knows he cannot do this now, and it is why he is unable to tell if the rat is a dream or reality.

Jose

After Joe realizes that he has no face or legs, he thinks that he is not really living, but can’t kill himself. He tries to stop breathing, but he can’t because a machine is pumping up his lungs for him.
He breaks into a memory about working the night shift at the bakery in L.A. On busy nights, the bakery would call a shelter to get some extra hands. One man named Jose comes from the shelter. He is a very hard worker and tells stories about his old job as a driver for a wealthy family. He left because the daughter of that family supposedly fell in love with him. Even though people don’t believe him, no one calls him out on it. Jose ends up working at the bakery full time.
One day Jose brings a letter to work from the daughter of the wealthy family. In it, the girl wants to visit Jose so they can marry. However, Jose does not want to marry her because he does not love her.
Jose gets another job at a studio, and he wants to quit the bakery job but can’t find a way to because he feels too grateful to Jody, the manager. For a while, he works both jobs and he only gets about an hour of sleep a night. He tries to get fired, and when he drops a whole cart of pies, he finally gets fired. He offers to pay Jody for the pies though, and he actually does. Joe never sees Jose again.
Joe respects Jose because he didn’t marry the girl for her money. He also respects him because he didn’t quit the job at the bakery right away when he got a new one. Jose is also a very peaceful person, and doesn’t want to tip the pies in the first place.