Death is always memorable in a frightening way. The finality of it is so grand that it constitutes the way we live our lives. The presence of death in life is too overwhelming throughout this particular reading. It seems that no matter how death occur it is always shocking and taunting for those who witness it. The narrator who experiences different tragedies in his life in which death was prevalent. The deaths of his mother, his carabao, Marco, Crispin, and Leroy all lead us to envision the difficulty of death and its nonnegotiable intimacy with a reality we ourselves do not want to face. Overall, that message is that there is no escape from death, it is cruel and untimely and imminent. But again what is a beginning without and ending?
It seems like every death is a loss inside the actual character. A loss of some part of him that he cannot regain.The story takes place in the poverty-stricken Philippines where the narrator works day in and day out on the rice fields of his homeland. His first death and loss happens to be his mother who dies when he was very young in childbirth. Metaphorically his mother in this sense is his homeland. Her death literally signifies the detachment from the place he was born and his grief in losing that part of him. In losing his mother he loses his homeland which results in the loss of his own identity. Severing these ties can only result in a separation. Throughout these deaths nature is a repetitive theme. As the narrator is sobbing on the fields he sees a bird being chased by a bat, which could represent the loss of his innocence. This tragedy altered his life because it suggests a loss of who he is and who he can become.
The narrator witnessed another violent death when his father brutally killed their carabao, who he considered to be a brother to him more than his own brother who basically killed his mother. The caraboa which basically represents the work they do in the fields is the symbolic death of his future in his homeland. It signifies how they work because they use the carabao to pull loads so that they can tend the fields but this particular death is his realization that he has no future in his homeland and I think it is his saddest death because of his reaction to it, along with his mother's death this is another death where he faces grief, unlike the rest of the deaths where grief isn't as present, hes almost accepting of it. Combined this with the loss of the image he once had of his "gentle" father- "I wanted to strike my father," but he fears and loves him so he doesn't. This is becomes a loss of his identity because his father undoubtedly would represent what he is to become, it was almost like this cruelty by his father symbolically made him dead. It altered his perceptions and pushed him to embark on this new journey.
The third death he witnesses foresees the loss of dreams and hope. Marco being the opposite of what the narrator seems to be is the representation of dreams immigrants look forward to in a new country. They come to fulfill what they cannot do in their own countries. People immigrate for lack of better options in their own countries. On the boat to come to America the narrator meets a boy that represents his own homeland, his murder becomes an extinction of his past life an his homeland along with a foreshadowing of the difficulties he will be encountering in this new world. Marco was a happy person, full of vivid emotions, a selfless person that aided him all the times he felt seasick. He is what remains of his home. His death being the final detachment from where he come from while also tainting his new journey.
We as people are a combination of people, of identities, feelings, and thoughts. And in each of us there is a piece of things we want to be. Crispin is a man the narrator meets in "the coldest winter" in Seattle and by the context clues we assume Crispin is some sort of artist in some way because of the poetic way in which he is described. This death again represents the ending of hope. Crispin dies in a very quiet, non-protesting way. He simply is there one day and gone the next. In this death there is almost a comparison between what it is to give up or continue, does fighting hunger and exhaustion make you a coward or a hero or are you a hero because you prefer death? Crispin let himself die and that to some is brave but with him he took this light that he reflected upon the world. So is the narrator a coward because he prefer to choke on newspapers than just end it right there? The melancholy in his eyes reflected what little peace the narrator could accept from the nightmare he was living in. Crispin is that last glimmer of hope, and his death the loss of even that little hope. Because death isn't itself sad, its the permanence of that loss we must face everyday.
The last death seemed to be the most violent and most unnecessary of all the other deaths. There is an assumption that Leroy was a black worker, speaking against the system, promoting ideas. He was a contemporary thinker and the narrator admired him for his wisdom. He was drawn to him because of his courage and in his ruthless murder Leroy was robbed of his manhood, his voice, his, sight, his courage. He died a meaningless death. This death would be engraved in his memory forever. And at the end of this story he doesn't comment on the complexities of politics at that time he only states that he would always remember "all the things Leroy taught him about living." What's interesting is not that he says all the things he taught him about life, but living which makes it more personal. Life would have been much more general, but living is much more personal, like Leroy helps the narrator see into his own life and find his own sense of living and identity in it and in the losses hes faced. Like the title it sparks this belief that these deaths impact the life of the narrator, and they are imprinted in him forever.
When immigrating somewhere there is always a loss of culture and ethnicity, immigrants are foreign to new areas where they must become accustomed to a new identity and at times we get lost in these new identities and forget where we came from. This is assimilation, which is a cruel because we don't even know it is happening or at what point we can no longer retreat from it. Losing your culture is something many immigrants face in a country as diverse as America. In the story races are mingled they are not identified so we don't exactly know what Crispin was or Leroy, we can only assume. But each of these men face a certain type of loss of identity.
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