How Do You Get Past the Evil?

[EEA]

I never felt that what Eli did was evil. Eli was just trying to survive just like everyone in the story wants to. She wants to live just like the rest.

[Nightrider]

Well...evil is so subjective...Just ask what Lacke and Virginia think about evil...Oh wait...I forgot...they're dead...

[sauvin]

The novel described Virginia's knowledge that the infection was a separate creature with its own brain. But how does Eli live with the guilt?

Take a farm boy from just outside Dubuque, Iowa, a sweetly innocent young church-going lad of all of maybe eighteen years, shove him through six weeks of boot camp, thrust a rifle into his arms and tell him "go kill all the little pukes in black pajamas". He does so, but when he comes back when his tour of duty is over, observe that he didn't come back "quite right". It's happened.

Take that same farm boy, let him stay in the war for twenty years or so. When his terms of service are done, he doesn't have a few notches on his belt, he has a few belts full of notches. Maybe he comes back "right", maybe he doesn't, but he almost certainly won't be the same sweetly innocent church-going lad who left. He'll have been hardened.

Ask this twenty-year veteran of a shooting war what he thinks of killing his fellow man, he's apt to come back with "I don't think about it. It's just what the job is." Ask the young man who came back after only two or three years of service, he's apt to tell you he has no idea how he's going to live with himself.

Somewhere between the second or third year of service, and that twentieth, this hypothetical young man learned to insulate himself from the morality of killing random strangers. There are a number of reasons this process might be accelerated and reinforced for the soldier that probably aren't germane to Eli's position, but the need for this insulation seems very clear because Eli doesn't seem to be a sociopath.

Note very carefully: I'm not saying she developed this insulation in order to survive the decades since she had been ripped away from her own farmstead, I'm simply speculating that her survival was made possible in large part by said insulation having fortuitously developed. The will to live was, after all, stronger than the pangs of conscience.

In a nutshell? She learned to wall it off.

[a_contemplative_life]

Hello everyone,

I saw LTROI, the movie, awhile ago and didn't exactly like it. But I had really, really, really wanted to watch it, so I bought the book hoping it would be better. Not really. They weren't exactly bad--at least not in the sense of being boring or badly made/written.

The movie: I don't feel like it addressed a crucial issue: the fact that Eli murders people and Oskar still likes him. Yes, I know he was bullied and Eli made him feel safe and loved. But he didn't seem to have much of a conscience. When he discovered how Eli got his food, he just seemed to think, "Oh, you're a vampire who eats people? OK." He never really mentioned that he was uncomfortable with the murders.

The book: I think Lindqvist did bring this up once or twice, and Eli said he doesn't enjoy killing people. But if he actually hated it, then in all his years with Hakan, why did he never figure out how to use halothane? Hakan used this to knock victims out, right? Eli's pretty smart (he solved the Rubik's cube) so it wouldn't have been hard for him to use it to make sure that at least the people he killed would suffer less. Eli's apparent lack of concern about this doesn't fit with one thing: when he closed the eyes of the woman with cancer whom he killed. This seemed like a kind of sweet gesture. Why don't his actions match?

In both the movie and the book, I hated what happened to Jocke, Virginia, and Lacke. They seemed like the kindest people. Eli's using Jocke's concern for him to kill him when Jocke believed Eli was hurt under the bridge was just horrible. I don't understand how anyone with a vestige of goodness (as Eli may have) could do something like that. Virginia deliberately set herself on fire to avoid hurting anyone, like Lacke and her grandson. And the only reason Eli lived was that Lacke had qualms about killing such a "helpless" child. He hesitated for a minute before trying to stab Eli, which gave Oskar time to yell a warning. Lacke's best friend Jocke and girlfriend Virginia were murdered, and all he tried to do was avenge them. Which he couldn't do because he felt sorry for the creature that killed them. It's just too unfair. (I realize that fiction isn't fair, but I can't deal with this one.)

So how do you get past the horrible things in LTROI? It's hard to have much sympathy for Oskar and Eli's relationship when they don't really care about anyone else. I liked the concept and the melancholy atmosphere--which makes me want to like this book and the movie. I also enjoy analyzing them both. I didn't like them, exactly, but they're so much fun to think about, which is why I'm on here.

I think LTROI invites us to set aside traditional moral values in order to explore something older and deeper--love, friendship, and the will to survive. Ultimately, the issues relate to the social compact. Society never turned its back on Virginia: Virginia does not turn her back on society. Society turned its back on Eli and Oskar; Eli and Oskar turn their back on society and turn themselves to the one thing that matters: each other.

[cmfireflies]

I think LTROI invites us to set aside traditional moral values in order to explore something older and deeper--love, friendship, and the will to survive. Ultimately, the issues relate to the social compact. Society never turned its back on Virginia: Virginia does not turn her back on society. Society turned its back on Eli and Oskar; Eli and Oskar turn their back on society and turn themselves to the one thing that matters: each other.

I agree. I just want to add that Eli's family gave her up to the vampire lord to survive, and Oskar's classmates were willing to let him drown because they were afraid of Conney's brother, these two things taught Eli and Oskar that (rightly or wrongly), there is nothing sacred about human life and the taboo against killing goes out the window when one's own existence is threatened.

[naxsah]

I always assumed that Eli was able to live with the guilt because as a kid he doesn't want to die but also because kids in general are more resilient than adults. So that might be why Eli was able to kill and get over the murders while Virginia wouldn't be able to do that.
Oskar would kill if he got the chance and I always thought that had he never met Eli, he would grow up to be a killer himself. So I thought that was why he didn't mind much that Eli killed to survive.

[metoo]

I just want to add that Eli's family gave her up to the vampire lord to survive, [...]

That's contradicted by the novel. According to Eli's memory, as re-lived by Oskar, Elias' mother tried to come to his rescue, but was forcefully stopped.

[cmfireflies]

I just want to add that Eli's family gave her up to the vampire lord to survive, [...]

That's contradicted by the novel. According to Eli's memory, as re-lived by Oskar, Elias' mother tried to come to his rescue, but was forcefully stopped.

i meant that her family took her to the castle in the first place. Eli even said that there was no mention of a reward or anything. The lord just said to come. I suppose they were hoping that she wouldn't be chosen, but the fact is that Eli's family offered her up as sacrifice.

[metoo]

i meant that her family took her to the castle in the first place. Eli even said that there was no mention of a reward or anything. The lord just said to come. I suppose they were hoping that she wouldn't be chosen, but the fact is that Eli's family offered her up as sacrifice.

You seem to forget that Eli was a boy back then....

But I don't think Elias' family had much choice, and I see no traces in he novel of Eli blaming them for what happened to him. On the contrary, still in 1981 there was one place where he wanted to be: With his family.

[cmfireflies]

You seem to forget that Eli was a boy back then....

But I don't think Elias' family had much choice, and I see no traces in he novel of Eli blaming them for what happened to him. On the contrary, still in 1981 there was one place where he wanted to be: With his family.

Fine. Elias is a boy.

I don't mean that Elias blamed his parents for taking him to the castle. In fact, he seems to has a low opinion of his worth and I'm sure he would have gone there willingly to help his family. What I mean is that the experiences at the hands of the vampire lord would have left Elias with no illusions about the world being "fair" or good always triumphing over evil. On another level, it means that Elias knows that there are fates worse than death, having gone through one himself. So I think it's easier for Eli to kill, because he understands that what he does, he does to survive. It's not blame that Eli carries with him, it's the knowledge that there are way more evil things to do than killing to survive.