This post has nothing to do with technology (except insofar as I sat on my couch for two long stretches this week, refreshing Twitter and Boston.com more than I ever have before), but much to do with why I teach English--and why we teachers all do what we do. I hope readers will forgive the off-topic post, in light of the recent events that have struck our region.
It was impossible to concentrate on my work yesterday, knowing that a terrorism suspect was on the loose a mere 3 miles away from my home. But today, things have essentially returned to normal here in Cambridge, and I’m doing the work I wanted to start yesterday. As I grade my 9th grade students’ essays on the novel
Lord of the Flies, I can’t help but see the parallels between the themes of the text—the tension between civilization and savagery—and the events of the past five days.
In
Lord of the Flies a plane carrying British schoolboys aged 6 to 12 crashes on a deserted island amid an imagined World War 3. It is a dystopian premise that tests the boys’ survival skills and their civility. Not one of the children fully escapes the savagery that sets in as the boys hunt and kill pigs—and each other. When the boys are rescued by a naval officer at the end of the novel, it is clear they are shell-shocked and will never again be the same.
Golding wrote the novel in the wake of World War II, when people around the world were struggling to comprehend the evils of the Holocaust and the atom bomb, in addition to the devastation of war. Golding’s bleak vision of mankind was colored by these events, and he stated that the goal of the novel was to show that “the defects of society can be traced back to the defects in human nature.”
Many of my students took this idea on in their essays. A few weeks ago, they began their essays with statements about the existence of evil within in all people. But in a testament to their own optimistic worldviews, they bucked Golding’s views and concluded that both evil and good lie within all people, and it’s a matter of choice.
Early in the novel, the character of Roger refuses to throw a rock at a younger boy, Henry, because “invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger’s arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.” By the end of the novel, Roger, “with a sense of delirious abandonment,” leans on a lever to release a rock that kills another child. At some point, Roger’s latent sadism is exposed and allowed to flourish.
At some point, Tamarlan Tsarnaev and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were innocent young men, just like the fictional Roger. They followed society’s rules, and we have to imagine that before Monday, they were afraid, at least to some extent, of the consequences of the law. Then, at some point, the Tsarnaevs made a choice to do something savage—something evil.
The Boston Marathon draws people together from across the globe to compete. Residents from all over Massachusetts gather along the course to cheer them on. I felt a sense of profound sadness on Monday to know that the bombers chose to wreak havoc amidst this beautiful celebration of the human spirit. The Boston Marathon will never be the same; the rules have been broken.
But unlike the boys in
Lord of the Flies, we had the resources to fight back against the Tsarnaevs’ savage acts. The people of Boston want to see good triumph over evil. The flood of emotions we Bostonians experienced when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was captured alive was a blend of relief that life could proceed as normal and jubilation that law enforcement officials—exactly those who provide the “invisible protection” of society that we so depend upon—bravely and bloodlessly ended the stand-off. The people of Boston want answers, and we want justice—just not vigilante justice.
It is still possible that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will not survive; he is at the hospital in critical condition as a result of the wounds he suffered on Thursday night when he engaged in a shoot-out with police. And no answers he provides to investigators about the motives he and his brother had for their actions can bring back the lives of Sean Collier, Lingzi Lu, Krystle Campbell, or Martin Richard. But a little bit of insight might just help us all understand how a young man could do something so savage--and perhaps prevent it from happening again.
I recognize that literature can't solve problems. But it can bring us together and it can help us to ask the right questions. Things will never be the same for young Ralph in
Lord of the Flies, nor will they be the same for us here in the Boston area. We must ask "Why did this happen?" and "How can we heal?" And we have to try to answer these questions together.
