We, The Infected

Dissecting the novel is like dissecting a frog... you understand it better, but the frog dies in the process.
I'd like people to step back from reading too much from the motivations and intentions of the characters and think about the underlying message of what JAL is trying to tell us in LTROI.
Good triumphs over evil... I don't think so. Love conquers all... nup. Innocence is better than maturity... sigh... well maybe.
My guess is that... if you leave everything alone and let the natural innate qualities of the human condition to run its course...the end result will always be the best and most natural outcome. Regardless of the perception and wishes of the onlooker. Something akin to Occam's razor.
An analogy might be like growing a seed. Plant it and stand back and do nothing but observe it do what it naturally does. It will pretty much do what it supposed to do without intervention or analysis. And why JAL has little to no interest in his novels after they are written... because they just are.

When I was a boy my mother used to despair at the lack of clocks in our house.I was fascinated by them.I would tear them apart to see how they worked and of course could never put them back together again.(another dead frog..lol).I feel the same about LTROI.I love to think of the inner workings,perceptions and motivations of the characters.I would never say you're wrong about the way you feel about this beautiful story.Just that we all love and cherish this work of art.We just love it differently.As it should be.

And I love the film so much, I don't know why I'm spending so much time with the novel. Currently using Google maps to locate everything mentioned. I know, a lot of this has been done and posted in the early days of the site, some of it by people who physically walked it. But I'm doing it, and things are coming to life for me that were just background.

I don't disagree with Ash. But, just as with the fan fictions I keep writing and posting, emersion in 1980s Sweden is its own reward.

Stephen King's nonfiction work 'Danse Macabre" came out somewhere in the late '70's or early '80's in which he surveyed horror fiction in print and in movies. What he did for a lot of the fiction he covered strongly resembles a lot of what we've been doing in this forum, which is funny because the book includes a rant against English teachers analysing works of fiction at such great depth and such microscopic detail that the power of the fiction is lost. It's rather like focusing on brush strokes in a painting rather than the painting itself.

As an English teacher there's positives and negatives on both sides. Which needs to be balanced with a good understanding of your audience.
Like in everything, a moderate approach is the sensible one.
Sometimes you might want to look for deeper messages by dissection, and others the whole message is greater than the sum of it's parts.
I often read texts that I finish with no commentary or analysis and simply close the book.
There's a lot to said for leaving an open interpretation without leading with one's personal bias. I think we saw it in the movie with Oskar's teacher.