Discussion#4 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Discussion#4 - Essay Example ty as a human being that prompts Bonaparte to remark â€Å"and I was somehow very small and very lost and lonely like a child astray in the snow.   And anything that happened to me afterwards, I never felt the same about it again† (OConnor 1163). As opposed to this, in the story of â€Å"Another way to die† an innocent bystander – a veterinarian – examines a soldier to check whether he is dead, when all of a sudden the almost-corpse grabs him with a death grip and topples him into a pit containing eight dead men. This cold clasp of death is the spur that makes the veterinarian think, â€Å"I’ll never get rid of this coldness again†. This quote is prompted by the veterinarian’s unwitting close brush with death, which leaves him uneasy from its clammy grip, while the changed feelings in Bonaparte arise from natural inner shame at his act of killing a man who had become a friend. The context of the two statements is therefore quite different and does not support a conclusion that both of them are similar people. Bonaparte is a soldier fighting a war, the veterinarian is a doctor who is involved only peripherally in the war. Bonaparte has taken action and killed a soldier friend, the veterinarian did not kill anyone, he was a doctor who was checking the pulse of a dead man. While Bonaparte as a soldier was involved in the business of taking lives, the veterinarian as a doctor was involved in the business of saving lives. Bonaparte killed his good friend even in a different setting – a remote boarding house. The veterinarian is also located in a zoo setting rather than directly on the battle field but he is close to the war because he soldiers move through the area each day, yet even in this war setting, he is saved by the very same lieutenant who had just buried four men and ordered the killing of four more. The dissimilarities between the men also arises out of the context within which the two stories are placed, despite the fact that both of them were