Killing for Love

[sauvin]

How strong are moral precepts like "thou shalt not kill" imbued in Oskar? He doesn't seem to come from a particularly religious household--in fact, I don't think there's a single religious reference in either his mother's apartment or his father's home. And there is no religiously oriented dialogue between Oskar and either of his parents. Now, I'm not saying that one has to be religious to believe that it's wrong to kill other people, but I don't think its really all that debatable that religious attitudes influence the views of a great many people on moral issues. So, it could be that Oskar's parents raised Oskar in a very moral home life, even if they weren't churchgoers. But I think that's unlikely.

It's not debatable that religious attitudes influence the views of a great many people on moral issues. What sometimes confuses me is that people from different cultures often harbour amazingly different views on moral issues even when their religious backgrounds are superficially similar.

Seeming to have become an undoubtedly arrogant agnostic, I tend to view religion, philosophy, law and science as being attempts at formalising social processes no doubt begun before Man tamed fire; with evidence of healed bones in Neadertal remains, I'd conjecture these processes began even before language - and that language, itself, is a tool developed over time to faciliate them.

Animals rarely kill their own (yes, some species more than others), and we just being animals with large brains seem to share this instinct. Religious teachings (in many religions) merely echo and amplity this instinct.

In neither the book nor the LTROI movie do we see much evidence of Oskar being overly concerned with matters of religion or his state of grace. Neither, for that matter, does anybody else. If what informs Oskar's reluctance to kill has some kind of religious basis, I'd suspect it'd be rather indirect - a cultural relict..

I also think that Oskar's feeling of estrangement from society and his fascination with violence would probably go a long way in breaking down the barriers he might have against doing it. If it's "us versus them," and Eli is all he's got, wouldn't it be natural from him to start being the bloodgetter at some point? Particularly if he knows that Eli finds it difficult to do it by herself--which she evidently does, unless she just had Hakan snowed the whole time.

If she had Hakan snowed, then she has the rest of us snowed, too.

If it's "us versus them", it might be natural for him to start trying to think that way. He did think that way, more or less, in the novel after he'd realised that some of Eli's blood may have soaked in through the scab on his palm after handling her clothing after the novel's bleed-out scene. Since he was going to become a vampire anyway, he reasoned, what harm would there be in bringing her a jug or two of fresh, hot Type O?

I don't question that Oskar can kill, and would, to protect Eli from a direct threat. In the movie, he brandished his knife at Lacke after bellowing an impressively commanding "NEJ!", and in the novel, he attacked Lacke with the Rubik's Cube he had been planning on giving to Eli as a gift - attacked twice, braining Lacke once with it in the temple, if memory serves. After the pool scene, novel or movie, attacking Eli while Oskar is around is definitely a potentially dangerous proposition.

Killing to defend against an immediate visible threat, though, is very different from assembling a Murder Kit and deliberately setting out to harvest another human being's blood. I'd question Oskar's ability to grapple with this outside of my own mean-spirited fan fiction.

And just how strong does Oskar's love for Eli need to be before he makes that decision? Does Hakan provide any kind of example? What was going on in Hakan's mind that finally tipped him over the edge to saying "yes"? I'm just a washed-up schoolteacher, but--I can do this. I tend to think that Hakan's "love" for Eli was more of an obsessive compulsion that was forever on the cusp of being fulfilled. "I'll let you touch me, if you do that thing for me." Or, a kiss on the cheek--and "I'm lost."

Hakan was, as one friend once put it, a "total loss without insurance". I can't get into that head because it's just a little too foreign, but my impression is that he values human life less than he values... erm... gratification.

By contrast, I like to think that there is a genuineness to the love that Eli and Oskar share. Deep and strong; unbreakable and centered on truth. A love that has at its goal the mutual desire that the other be all that they can humanly be.

The misanthrope in me reminds the board that all human association is based on mutual benefit at some level. This is particularly true of pair bonding. The "benefit" doesn't have to be visible or tangible, it simply has to be perceived. What you're calling "centered on truth" is what I'm calling "willing to splay out the hands to show you're unarmed and intend no harm".

Does anyone think that a loving Eli would ask? Or would she just not object? Is there a moral difference between asking your lover to kill for you, as opposed to not preventing it from happening when he decides on his own accord to do it? Or would she object at first, but then fail to object when she's recently aroused from one of her long sleeps, and is small and weak again? And would such a moment be the point where the idea of Oskar going out and finding victims at last takes root?

The "moral difference" seems so thin it'd be a matter of how many demons can dance lewdly on the point of a darning needle. Here, the only real "morality" is imposed by the beast: kill or die.

Do I think a loving Eli would ask? Part of the answer to this question depends on how emotionally advanced you want to perceive a perpetually preteen Eli. Can she see a priori that making such a request would corrode him? To make matters worse, can she see that trying to forbid that he procure for her may prove similarly corrosive when she has difficulty providing for herself to the extent that her appearance becomes more gaunt and emaciated - and he's "powerless" to help her?

I suspect even a truly emotionally and mentally frozen Eli could perceive these difficulties, even if she can't articulate them the way we would. A truly loving and concerned Eli just might ask, and if asked to explain her reasoning, could find our approval in her wisdom - and she could try to forbid him to even make the attempt, and we could still applaud her wisdom. There is no clear "win" here, there's only what the kids decide for themselves, individually and together, what might be best way to proceed.

Of course, it's always possible that Eli might decide to leave Oskar before he finally crosses the line. Maybe she'd decide that if she really wants what is best for Oskar, that he be free of her unavoidably corrosive influence. But there's a selfish side to love too, isn't there? He's the one true friend she's had for over 200 years. Pretty hard to give that up, isn't it? Very hard.

I don't think she can. She's been imprisoned by the beast for two centuries, and remains so. Pity Oskar had to move into her cell with her, but who knows? If they'd never met, maybe a few more years, a few more decades, Eli might have found another boy or girl. One can only hope that the value her cellmate receives from life with her outweighs the cost.

After having spent a few months too many with Eli, though, I suspect Oskar's emotional imprisonment would continue should they part. At his age, a little bit of emotional compromise can go a long ways towards destroying a long life.

-"Oskar at 40" -- deep in the trenches. Getting his hands bloody every week or so. Humanity leaching out all over the place. Burning out.

- Parting ways at whatever age you want to pick - 16, 17, 18? Plus/minus 5 years, somewhere in there.

- Eli turns Oskar - a LTODD scenario.

- Eli asks Oskar to kill her at some point. A mercy killing. Or they make it a mutual suicide.

- Eli somehow manages to get what she needs on her own while preserving some semblance of "innocent" love with Oskar. Hard to say how long it could go on.

Most of these prospects look pretty dim to me.

Addendum: Drakkar's mention of unforeseen misfortune.

We don't know how Eli's done it for so long, and we don't know that she's always had a minder in all that time. She's still around; she's a survivor. I personally rather suspect that she recruits and cultivates minders not only for the convenience and additional safety they afford her, but also for the frangible illusion of having remained connected to humanity somehow.

Fanfiction has credibly suggested that she's sown a few seeds of goodwill here and there (the novel doesn't, but doesn't definitively preclude the possibility, either), and that she may very well have some safe houses or private temporary sanctuaries set aside. Even if not, getting a few supplies for Oskar shouldn't prove an insurmountable obstacle, witness from the novel that she can barge into a closed store for a couple cans of accelerant and be gone before anybody realises something's gone amiss.

There always remains the possibility of discovery or other accidents, though. Maybe Oskar falls out a fourth storey window and breaks his neck.

40something Oskar never considered leaving Eli, and I can't quite say why. Maybe Eli had considered the possibility once or twice, but as ACL says, "pretty hard to give up, isn't it? Very hard". After a while, when the newness has worn off, there are a number of practical concerns for Oskar's not returning to "normal life", including not wanting to explain to authorities where he'd been, who he'd been with or what he'd been doing. However, also after the same while, she'd have gotten to be a part of him, a part, I fear, he couldn't live without.

Eli had tried to shield him from the worst of her existence. In the fanfics, she'd left Blackeberg for a few days assemble a survival kit for him on what she'd seen as the off-chance he might want to come with her, and this included "buying a man". How well that might or might not have worked over those first few years is left as an exercise for those whose creative imaginations are more Stygian than my own (and what I would write is guaranteed not to survive moderation - it might not even survive my own internal censor), but in the early years, Eli wanted everything to "stay the same". She tried. She really, really did.

What first spurred the boy who went on to be 40something Oskar into procuring had nothing to do with defense. Sooner or later, preteen Eli who can bungle a simple drop from a tree is going to find herself caught short after one of her dormant periods. Maybe she got halfway across the basement floor, stranded and unable to move, looking like something Gustav Dore screamed himself awake from a nightmare with. Maybe Oskar just couldn't handle the sound of her stomach rumbling anymore.

Eli objected? Yes, I believe she did. At some level she'd had to've known that what she asked of Hakan (for whom she also had to've known by now she'd had such poor regard) isn't something you ask of somebody whose emotional welfare matters, and Eli could very credibly protest "I've been doing this for over two hundred years, and it hasn't always been easy, and I've not always had help, but I'm still here, and I can do it again without your help!". Would a teenaged Oskar beginning to approach his physical prime and entering a period of hormonal insanity hear the truth and the confidence in those words? What kind of man shirks the duty to bring home the bacon just because a shrilly defiant pint-sized vampire fears it might entail obvious physical dangers and invisible, inexplicable ones?

Love is a double-edged sword, sometimes. She gave him the confidence to think and act for himself. She also gave him the confidence to think and act for her, intentionally or not.

The occasion of that first procurement was probably the most acutely uncomfortable. Eli wouldn't refuse the benefit, of course - she couldn't, any more than you or I could turn down a juicy fried ham steak and a pile of hot, steaming hash browns after having missed half a dozen meals too many. What's she going to do - slap him? Scream obscenities and hurl abuse? Threaten to send him to his room?

The Eli I know would be more apt to be remorseful. Now that I'm being forced to consider how 40something Oskar got to that stage, she'd feel bad that her darkness has begun to envelop him. He's both bright and sensitive; he'd pick up on it, and wonder if maybe he'd done something wrong. Eli isn't exactly a stone, either, she'd feel his feeling that something's wrong.

Would Oskar be dealing with guilt over murder? Her life had been at stake, yes, but it had still been cold-blooded murder since the victim had had nothing to do with any direct threat to her. Would that guilt cast a shadow over their relationship? I'd think so - and however they resolved their emotional differences that night (or in the succeeding weeks and months, for that matter) as a result, this, I think, marks the beginning of Oskar's, um, attitudes towards "bringing home the bacon".

If there had ever been a true crisis in their post-Blackeberg lives together, this could be it. Once having seen what lengths to which Oskar would go to stay with her, it's more than possible that Eli comes to realise with unprecendented force just how cursed is her existence. She very well could have asked Oskar to kill her - or could have just slipped away "just to do some shopping" to go see the rising sun. The only thing that might have stopped her is the thought that her demise would finish him.

As for Oskar? In the fanfics, implied if not outright explained, is the fact that Eli is the only part of his life that hasn't somehow betrayed or abandoned him. Even her vampirism doesn't count, because she'd told him what she was and what she has to do to survive, before she saved his life at the pool. She was eternal, for good or for bad, and the one part of his life that will endure (he hopes) long after his bones have turned to dust.

[a_contemplative_life]

In neither the book nor the LTROI movie do we see much evidence of Oskar being overly concerned with matters of religion or his state of grace. Neither, for that matter, does anybody else. If what informs Oskar's reluctance to kill has some kind of religious basis, I'd suspect it'd be rather indirect - a cultural relict.

I agree. I think all we really have is what we can infer about his mother's influence on him. She seems to be a caring mother, and it's probably fair to assume she raised Oskar to know the difference between right and wrong.

If it's "us versus them", it might be natural for him to start trying to think that way. He did think that way, more or less, in the novel after he'd realised that some of Eli's blood may have soaked in through the scab on his palm after handling her clothing after the novel's bleed-out scene. Since he was going to become a vampire anyway, he reasoned, what harm would there be in bringing her a jug or two of fresh, hot Type O?

I don't question that Oskar can kill, and would, to protect Eli from a direct threat. In the movie, he brandished his knife at Lacke after bellowing an impressively commanding "NEJ!", and in the novel, he attacked Lacke with the Rubik's Cube he had been planning on giving to Eli as a gift - attacked twice, braining Lacke once with it in the temple, if memory serves. After the pool scene, novel or movie, attacking Eli while Oskar is around is definitely a potentially dangerous proposition.

Killing to defend against an immediate visible threat, though, is very different from assembling a Murder Kit and deliberately setting out to harvest another human being's blood. I'd question Oskar's ability to grapple with this outside of my own mean-spirited fan fiction.

I think, especially after the events at the pool, that Oskar and Eli would (justifiably) very much feel that it's "us versus them." They were outcasts to begin with, not accepted by society, but the deaths of Oskar's persecutors have, to my way of thinking, more or less put the seal on that, because Eli has now committed three murders and Oskar is closely tied to her actions.

In the novel we have an Oskar who is flirting with the idea of violence and homicide. He fantasizes about killing his enemies as a kind of emotional release. The evil clown with the piss-ball nose; he scares himself. As you point out, he thinks about killing Conny and bringing Eli his blood, a thought that seems more real, perhaps, because he is at the time fearful that he, himself, will now become a vampire as well. At the bathroom in Eli's apartment, he threatens Lacke with a knife, but then grows fearful when Lacke turns to look at him; shortly thereafter, he closes the door and turns away as Eli goes about her brutal business, and he drops his knife.

But when Eli offers him a bloody kiss, he doesn't turn away; he doesn't flinch. Is this a sign of acceptance not only of Eli's love, but also the bloody business that accompanies a life with her? I think the answer must be 'yes.' Could the point be any more graphically hammered home, particularly when it would have been a simple thing for Eli to wipe the blood from her lips before laying a big one on Oskar? Will the next Lacke be easier for him to manage, from a psychological perspective? It's always harder the first time, they say. The more often you do something, the easier it becomes, right? Perhaps the first person Oskar kills will be fairly viewed by him as a threat to Eli. An intruder, or someone unexpectedly encountered in the field. But who knows--maybe, as time progresses, Oskar might take an expansive view of what "protecting Eli" really means. Maybe "protecting Eli" will eventually come to mean nothing less than keeping Eli well-fed.

The misanthrope in me reminds the board that all human association is based on mutual benefit at some level. This is particularly true of pair bonding. The "benefit" doesn't have to be visible or tangible, it simply has to be perceived. What you're calling "centered on truth" is what I'm calling "willing to splay out the hands to show you're unarmed and intend no harm".

Not sure I understand what you mean about splaying the hands, but I agree about mutual benefit. Which I think is yet another reason to believe that Oskar will be at risk for this sort of thing.

Do I think a loving Eli would ask? Part of the answer to this question depends on how emotionally advanced you want to perceive a perpetually preteen Eli. Can she see a priori that making such a request would corrode him? To make matters worse, can she see that trying to forbid that he procure for her may prove similarly corrosive when she has difficulty providing for herself to the extent that her appearance becomes more gaunt and emaciated - and he's "powerless" to help her?

I suspect even a truly emotionally and mentally frozen Eli could perceive these difficulties, even if she can't articulate them the way we would.

I think Eli's been living with herself long enough to fully appreciate how her "disease" corrodes all of her relationships. The question ultimately becomes whether she can identify and preserve that aspect of Oskar's love that brings her true happiness. Oskar offers Eli total acceptance. He has chosen to love her, even knowing what she is and what she does. But is that the only reason Eli loves Oskar? What is it that she sees in him?

I personally rather suspect that she recruits and cultivates minders not only for the convenience and additional safety they afford her, but also for the frangible illusion of having remained connected to humanity somehow.

I think what you've said is the other side of the same coin of my way of seeing it--that the true child buried within Eli is desperately trying to distance herself from herself and what lives inside her. Trying to maintain some sort of emotional barrier or cushion, if you will. And if some other person, typically an adult, can be manipulated or maneuvered into going out to do the dirty work, so much the better. And maybe there is something approaching a rationalization in the back of her mind that says that it is the world of adults that betrayed her in the first place, so it is fair that adults should pay.

40something Oskar never considered leaving Eli, and I can't quite say why. Maybe Eli had considered the possibility once or twice, but as ACL says, "pretty hard to give up, isn't it? Very hard". After a while, when the newness has worn off, there are a number of practical concerns for Oskar's not returning to "normal life", including not wanting to explain to authorities where he'd been, who he'd been with or what he'd been doing. However, also after the same while, she'd have gotten to be a part of him, a part, I fear, he couldn't live without.

One factor that goes along with what you've said is how utterly cut off from society these two end up. They would both be wanted by authorities. Eli needs blood to live. There would be very few people they could trust with her secret. This would tend to turn them inward toward each other in a way that I don't think holds true for most couples, who may be devoted to each other but still maintain a circle of friends, a place in society, and occupations that tie them to the outside world. All of the pressures on them would constantly force them together, and if it were not true already, it would quickly become true that Eli is everything to Oskar, and Oskar is everything to Eli. They are literally living for each other in isolation and solitude.

Love is a double-edged sword, sometimes. She gave him the confidence to think and act for himself. She also gave him the confidence to think and act for her, intentionally or not.

Agreed. And he would certainly want to; and we know from Oskar's sometimes defiant relationship with his mother that he is a strong-willed person.

The Eli I know would be more apt to be remorseful. Now that I'm being forced to consider how 40something Oskar got to that stage, she'd feel bad that her darkness has begun to envelop him. He's both bright and sensitive; he'd pick up on it, and wonder if maybe he'd done something wrong. Eli isn't exactly a stone, either, she'd feel his feeling that something's wrong.

Would Oskar be dealing with guilt over murder? Her life had been at stake, yes, but it had still been cold-blooded murder since the victim had had nothing to do with any direct threat to her. Would that guilt cast a shadow over their relationship? I'd think so - and however they resolved their emotional differences that night (or in the succeeding weeks and months, for that matter) as a result, this, I think, marks the beginning of Oskar's, um, attitudes towards "bringing home the bacon".

I agree with your assessment, and would only add another thought: would an adult Oskar, in pondering the step he'd just taken for Eli, view it as little more than a logical progression for what he in his love for Eli had been doing all along? By this point, he'd certainly be viewing himself as Eli's protector during the daylight hours. He probably would have seen to her safe transit from one locale to another. He would have helped rent places for them to live, perhaps found employment to ensure a steady source of money, etc. All the sorts of things that we think of when we talk about "aiding and abetting," and "harboring a fugitive." His hands are dirty, just being with her. What is a little more dirt, if it helps her?

And moreover, who is Eli now living for? Is not her continued desire to live (and therefore the bloodshed that her ongoing existence entails) based substantially, if not completely, on her loving relationship with Oskar? Oskar's loving Eli, in this sense, equates with untold future deaths of third persons.

[lombano]

Animals rarely kill their own (yes, some species more than others), and we just being animals with large brains seem to share this instinct. Religious teachings (in many religions) merely echo and amplity this instinct.

Well, predators are usually pretty murderous, including towards their own kind. Actually, with the exception of frogs, humans are probably among the most-mild mannered predators around, though also the most powerful. King Herod was a nice guy compared to your average lion (lions taking over a pride kill all the cubs), and lions aren't as bad as spiders - some species routinely devour any of their own young not fast enough to get away. Also, among primates, chimps are more vicious towards other chimps than humans.
Many religions and their holy texts have injunctions against murder, yet plenty of massacres have been committed in the name of religion or have been endorsed by religious authorities - there's a difference a religion's founding principles and what the practitioners actually do in, well, practice. In that sense, religion-based morality is subject to the same compartmentalisation, rationalisation and cognitive dissonance processes as morality based on anything else. In this sense, I think it makes little difference whether Oskar has been taught killing is wrong based on explicitly religious principles or secular arguments. Eli cannot obey 'Thou shall not kill' as she must either kill others or commit suicide, and starving herself to death would just be a particularly unpleasant way of doing the latter. Though Eli is far more likely to have been taught killing is wrong in explicitly religious terms, I can easily see her and Oskar's views on the matter converging.

I agree with your assessment, and would only add another thought: would an adult Oskar, in pondering the step he'd just taken for Eli, view it as little more than a logical progression for what he in his love for Eli had been doing all along? By this point, he'd certainly be viewing himself as Eli's protector during the daylight hours. He probably would have seen to her safe transit from one locale to another. He would have helped rent places for them to live, perhaps found employment to ensure a steady source of money, etc. All the sorts of things that we think of when we talk about "aiding and abetting," and "harboring a fugitive." His hands are dirty, just being with her. What is a little more dirt, if it helps her?

Oskar may well judge, like Macbeth:

I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er

[drakkar]

In neither the book nor the LTROI movie do we see much evidence of Oskar being overly concerned with matters of religion or his state of grace. Neither, for that matter, does anybody else. If what informs Oskar's reluctance to kill has some kind of religious basis, I'd suspect it'd be rather indirect - a cultural relict.

I agree. I think all we really have is what we can infer about his mother's influence on him. She seems to be a caring mother, and it's probably fair to assume she raised Oskar to know the difference between right and wrong.

I don't think you should expect it to show in any explicit way. A morally decent citizen might not even go to church, or show any outer signs of his religion.
Funny thing is in the book, one of the most religious characters, Staffan, is also one of the least likeable. As if to say it is the inner qualities that counts, not what you show others.
Oskar's mother is caring all right, but I got the strong impression Oskar was her "project", to prove her success as mother. Oskar was there for her sake, not the other way around. As a(nother) contrast to Eli.

[lombano]

Oskar's mother is caring all right, but I got the strong impression Oskar was her "project", to prove her success as mother. Oskar was there for her sake, not the other way around.

Spot on, I think. To me her lines of 'they will blame us..' and if she should tell them her son doesn't have a father, say it all.

[sauvin]

Oskar's mother is caring all right, but I got the strong impression Oskar was her "project", to prove her success as mother. Oskar was there for her sake, not the other way around.

Spot on, I think. To me her lines of 'they will blame us..' and if she should tell them her son doesn't have a father, say it all.

Her motivations may not be in the spirit of true motherhood (and I certainly agree this is so), but that's not to say she wouldn't do a *reasonable* job, or reasonably effectively, but it does have some depressing implications for Oskar's future relationship wtih her if Eli had never come around.

Killing to defend against an immediate visible threat, though, is very different from assembling a Murder Kit and deliberately setting out to harvest another human being's blood. I'd question Oskar's ability to grapple with this outside of my own mean-spirited fan fiction.

I think, especially after the events at the pool, that Oskar and Eli would (justifiably) very much feel that it's "us versus them." They were outcasts to begin with, not accepted by society, but the deaths of Oskar's persecutors have, to my way of thinking, more or less put the seal on that, because Eli has now committed three murders and Oskar is closely tied to her actions.

Both had been insanely lonely, and they will tend to bind very deeply very quickly. In Oskar's case, there's always the possibility (I believe it slim) that this is for him a relationship founded in "extreme circumstance", apt to lose its appeal as quickly as it came when circumstances lose their apparent extremity, but for Eli, if this really is her first "normal relationship" in two hundred years, it's almost certainly no fleeting dalliance.

I agree the "us versus them" mentality could take Oskar a long ways towards enabling Oskar to procure, but I disagree that this alone is enough. Novel Oskar's mixed reaction towards having split Conny's ear is a case in point - he might hate Conny and even wish him dead, but has no desire that Conny should suffer.

In the novel we have an Oskar who is flirting with the idea of violence and homicide. He fantasizes about killing his enemies as a kind of emotional release. The evil clown with the [deleted]-ball nose; he scares himself. As you point out, he thinks about killing Conny and bringing Eli his blood, a thought that seems more real, perhaps, because he is at the time fearful that he, himself, will now become a vampire as well. At the bathroom in Eli's apartment, he threatens Lacke with a knife, but then grows fearful when Lacke turns to look at him; shortly thereafter, he closes the door and turns away as Eli goes about her brutal business, and he drops his knife.

Thinking about bringing Eli his worst enemy isn't the same as thinking about bringing Eli some random stranger, though. This is "two birds with one stone". We've also speculated rather heavily in other topics that even novel Oskar isn't (necessarily) a young serial murderer in training. As you point out, emotional release is one component of Oskar's true desire; another is in simply being left alone. If the bullies were to suddenly lose interest in him, I suspect, Oskar might start losing interest in his scrapbook of murders. Or, the interest might morph into something more oriented towards becoming a forensic examiner rather than the creator of forensic evidence.

It's hard to say what had actually been going through movie Oskar's mind as the knife he'd been brandishing at Lacke wavered. One does have to believe a strong element of fear is present, but could some of that fear not be in his realisation that he had been brandishing this knife, and had apparently honestly intended to use it? He's twelve, yes, but he's not simple.

But when Eli offers him a bloody kiss, he doesn't turn away; he doesn't flinch. Is this a sign of acceptance not only of Eli's love, but also the bloody business that accompanies a life with her? I think the answer must be 'yes.' Could the point be any more graphically hammered home, particularly when it would have been a simple thing for Eli to wipe the blood from her lips before laying a big one on Oskar?

He's only twelve years old. He'd only recently discovered the light of his life can't live in the light of day. Novel Oskar had also just effectively severed diplomatic relations with his werewolf father, and movie Oskar had just considered trying to communicate something to his sleeping mother - and decided against it. And now, just seconds ago, he watched the light of his life put out a grown man's light permanently.

The passages in the novel following Oskar's trains of thought after the clubhouse scene up to the moment he knocked Eli's name on her apartment door after having fled his father's house is a showcase of conflicting and shifting emotions. There's disbelief, distaste, denial, wanting nothing more to do with his girlfriend,, suddenly reaching his limit with his father's dichotomy - on through to dejection when Eli fails to answer the doorbell and elation when she answers his Morse code knock.

This whole experience is an emotional roller coaster ride, where movie Oskar is taken from the very zenith of euphoria on the ice almost to the nadir of despair as he discovers the girl he'd decided to hitch his near-term life's wagon to was inherently duplicitous. Life with Eli just keeps punching him in the face, picking him up and punching him again.

I have no idea what I might have been thinking in Oskar's place in the moments after Lacke's death. Too much cumulative emotional shock. I think it's possible movie Oskar had simply shut down and cast away everything but what was happening this very moment, even to the point of casting away the blood on her mouth because it belongs to something that isn't relevant to what's happening right here, right now, and what's happening right here, right now is that his girlfriend is kissing him.

You may be right, and his accepting her bloody kiss without complaint and without reservation may be as simple as having simple accepted all the baggage that Eli carries with her in one easy innocent smooch, but I'm not inclined to believe so.

Will the next Lacke be easier for him to manage, from a psychological perspective? It's always harder the first time, they say. The more often you do something, the easier it becomes, right? Perhaps the first person Oskar kills will be fairly viewed by him as a threat to Eli. An intruder, or someone unexpectedly encountered in the field. But who knows--maybe, as time progresses, Oskar might take an expansive view of what "protecting Eli" really means. Maybe "protecting Eli" will eventually come to mean nothing less than keeping Eli well-fed.

I don't know if 40something Oskar's first kill was defensive or procurative - or maybe even just accidental. Things don't always get "easier" with practise, since we've also pretty much unanimously decided that Oskar is no sociopath, but practise does bring a certain smoothness. 40something Oskar had indeed reached such an "expansive view" some considerable time before, that getting for her what she can't always get easily or safely for herself is part of protecting her and keeping her safe. But if things get "easier", then why is 40something Oskar's soul so beaten, ragged and worn out?

The misanthrope in me reminds the board that all human association is based on mutual benefit at some level. This is particularly true of pair bonding. The "benefit" doesn't have to be visible or tangible, it simply has to be perceived. What you're calling "centered on truth" is what I'm calling "willing to splay out the hands to show you're unarmed and intend no harm".

Not sure I understand what you mean about splaying the hands, but I agree about mutual benefit. Which I think is yet another reason to believe that Oskar will be at risk for this sort of thing.

"Come out with your hands up!" What you're calling "centered on truth" is what I'm calling "based on the perception of mutual vulnerability".

Do I think a loving Eli would ask? Part of the answer to this question depends on how emotionally advanced you want to perceive a perpetually preteen Eli. Can she see a priori that making such a request would corrode him? To make matters worse, can she see that trying to forbid that he procure for her may prove similarly corrosive when she has difficulty providing for herself to the extent that her appearance becomes more gaunt and emaciated - and he's "powerless" to help her?

I think Eli's been living with herself long enough to fully appreciate how her "disease" corrodes all of her relationships. The question ultimately becomes whether she can identify and preserve that aspect of Oskar's love that brings her true happiness. Oskar offers Eli total acceptance. He has chosen to love her, even knowing what she is and what she does. But is that the only reason Eli loves Oskar? What is it that she sees in him?

What she sees in him is what she long ago lost in herself.

Eli's been living with herself long enough to fully appreciate how her "disease" corrodes all of her relationships, but again, in the novel, Eli admits to not having had a "normal" relationship in two hundred years. We speculate that most or all of her past relationships have been much more explicitly on the basis of mutual "benefit", where she does things for them, and then they do things for her, because "that's what love is, isn't it?" Would an Eli accustomed to such relationships be fully cognisant of what Oskar is to her, what their relationship is, and how the realities of her existence would impact them differently than with her prior distorted experiences?

I personally rather suspect that she recruits and cultivates minders not only for the convenience and additional safety they afford her, but also for the frangible illusion of having remained connected to humanity somehow.

I think what you've said is the other side of the same coin of my way of seeing it--that the true child buried within Eli is desperately trying to distance herself from herself and what lives inside her. Trying to maintain some sort of emotional barrier or cushion, if you will. And if some other person, typically an adult, can be manipulated or maneuvered into going out to do the dirty work, so much the better. And maybe there is something approaching a rationalization in the back of her mind that says that it is the world of adults that betrayed her in the first place, so it is fair that adults should pay.

Trying to distance herself from her beast but trying to keep from being too distanced from people. Living with a minder can help on both counts, even if the relationships she forms with them tend to be grotesque parodies. is there something in the back of her mind suggesting that adults needing to pay for past adult transgressions against her? Maybe - but novel Eli is shown once coming within a single delicately tentative touch away from eating Oskar and blowing the whole story away. If she'll eat twelve year olds, she'll eat anything, and adults wouldn't seem to be specially or specifically targeted.

40something Oskar never considered leaving Eli, and I can't quite say why. Maybe Eli had considered the possibility once or twice, but as ACL says, "pretty hard to give up, isn't it? Very hard". After a while, when the newness has worn off, there are a number of practical concerns for Oskar's not returning to "normal life", including not wanting to explain to authorities where he'd been, who he'd been with or what he'd been doing. However, also after the same while, she'd have gotten to be a part of him, a part, I fear, he couldn't live without.

One factor that goes along with what you've said is how utterly cut off from society these two end up. They would both be wanted by authorities. Eli needs blood to live. There would be very few people they could trust with her secret. This would tend to turn them inward toward each other in a way that I don't think holds true for most couples, who may be devoted to each other but still maintain a circle of friends, a place in society, and occupations that tie them to the outside world. All of the pressures on them would constantly force them together, and if it were not true already, it would quickly become true that Eli is everything to Oskar, and Oskar is everything to Eli. They are literally living for each other in isolation and solitude.

They're living for eachother, and living with eachother (which isn't quite the same thing), but they're also each living for himself individually. Oskar doesn't lose his humanity, his sense of self or the whatever values he might have had prior to having met Eli. He has to make choices between those values and his love for Eli, and those choices won't be cut-and-dried, either/or, black/white or good/evil.

Love is a double-edged sword, sometimes. She gave him the confidence to think and act for himself. She also gave him the confidence to think and act for her, intentionally or not.

Agreed. And he would certainly want to; and we know from Oskar's sometimes defiant relationship with his mother that he is a strong-willed person.

Not as strongly willed as after having spent a while with an Eli who really does give him a sense of worth.

The Eli I know would be more apt to be remorseful. Now that I'm being forced to consider how 40something Oskar got to that stage, she'd feel bad that her darkness has begun to envelop him. He's both bright and sensitive; he'd pick up on it, and wonder if maybe he'd done something wrong. Eli isn't exactly a stone, either, she'd feel his feeling that something's wrong.

Would Oskar be dealing with guilt over murder? Her life had been at stake, yes, but it had still been cold-blooded murder since the victim had had nothing to do with any direct threat to her. Would that guilt cast a shadow over their relationship? I'd think so - and however they resolved their emotional differences that night (or in the succeeding weeks and months, for that matter) as a result, this, I think, marks the beginning of Oskar's, um, attitudes towards "bringing home the bacon".

I agree with your assessment, and would only add another thought: would an adult Oskar, in pondering the step he'd just taken for Eli, view it as little more than a logical progression for what he in his love for Eli had been doing all along? By this point, he'd certainly be viewing himself as Eli's protector during the daylight hours. He probably would have seen to her safe transit from one locale to another. He would have helped rent places for them to live, perhaps found employment to ensure a steady source of money, etc. All the sorts of things that we think of when we talk about "aiding and abetting," and "harboring a fugitive." His hands are dirty, just being with her. What is a little more dirt, if it helps her?

What indeed is a little more dirt, if it helps her? But somewhere along the line, these "progressions" don't necessarily follow a deterministic sequence, and Oskar is going to be finding himself drawing lines in the sand, erasing them, redrawing them, and considering just how dirty he wants to be. My 40something Oskar followed one possible trajectory; another Oskar might get a few dead bodies down the road and decide that he's lost himself and wants no longer to live.

And moreover, who is Eli now living for? Is not her continued desire to live (and therefore the bloodshed that her ongoing existence entails) based substantially, if not completely, on her loving relationship with Oskar? Oskar's loving Eli, in this sense, equates with untold future deaths of third persons.[/quote]

[lombano]

Her motivations may not be in the spirit of true motherhood (and I certainly agree this is so), but that's not to say she wouldn't do a *reasonable* job, or reasonably effectively, but it does have some depressing implications for Oskar's future relationship wtih her if Eli had never come around.

Of course, it could be much worse - but in Oskar's case it's not good enough.

If she'll eat twelve year olds, she'll eat anything, and adults wouldn't seem to be specially or specifically targeted.

There are some advanbtages in targeting adults though - more blood per kill and others are even less likely to think a child did it.

[sauvin]

Animals rarely kill their own (yes, some species more than others), and we just being animals with large brains seem to share this instinct. Religious teachings (in many religions) merely echo and amplity this instinct.

Well, predators are usually pretty murderous, including towards their own kind. Actually, with the exception of frogs, humans are probably among the most-mild mannered predators around, though also the most powerful. King Herod was a nice guy compared to your average lion (lions taking over a pride kill all the cubs), and lions aren't as bad as spiders - some species routinely devour any of their own young not fast enough to get away. Also, among primates, chimps are more vicious towards other chimps than humans.
Many religions and their holy texts have injunctions against murder, yet plenty of massacres have been committed in the name of religion or have been endorsed by religious authorities - there's a difference a religion's founding principles and what the practitioners actually do in, well, practice. In that sense, religion-based morality is subject to the same compartmentalisation, rationalisation and cognitive dissonance processes as morality based on anything else. In this sense, I think it makes little difference whether Oskar has been taught killing is wrong based on explicitly religious principles or secular arguments. Eli cannot obey 'Thou shall not kill' as she must either kill others or commit suicide, and starving herself to death would just be a particularly unpleasant way of doing the latter. Though Eli is far more likely to have been taught killing is wrong in explicitly religious terms, I can easily see her and Oskar's views on the matter converging.

Actually, it might be less interesting to talk about predators in general and more specifically in this case about chimps and bonobos. I grant chimps can be pretty dark, but we're also said to be closely tied to bonobos.

[lombano]

I think chimps are our nearest relatives, but don't quote me on that.

[a_contemplative_life]

Oskar's mother is caring all right, but I got the strong impression Oskar was her "project", to prove her success as mother. Oskar was there for her sake, not the other way around.

Spot on, I think. To me her lines of 'they will blame us..' and if she should tell them her son doesn't have a father, say it all.

However that may be, I am not sure it addresses the question of how well Oskar's parents have cultivated a moral education in their child. You can have a self-centered, egotistical parent who still makes sure their child knows the difference between right and wrong.

In Oskar's case, I think mom and dad may have tried, but perhaps their broken marriage has created an impediment. After all, the novel Oskar sneaks around, keeps secrets from his mother, shoplifts, etc. They're not really very in touch with what their young son is up to, and what he's doing when they're not around. I'm hesitant to rely on his childhood behavior to predict how upstanding he would be as an adult, because many things can happen betwixt and between, but still you get the impression that Oskar is more interested in self-survival and a bit of self-satisfaction along the way than any fear of breaking the law. So I would say he's vulnerable to progressing on toward more unlawful behavior as he grows up, particularly if he's running around on the lam with Eli.