Faulks maintains a theme of dehumanising throughout the course of the novel, and this part of the novel is a key example of that. During the Battle
of the Somme it is used maybe to show how the war had become inhumane and as
Stephen thought that battle and violence had “proved you could be human yet act
in a way that was beyond nature”. Then in the midst of the battle
Stephen saw “machine gunners pouring bullets into the lines of advancing German
infantry as though there was no longer any value accorded to a mere human life”. The ‘pouring’ that Faulks describes
is like a continuous flow or
steady stream that is ongoing and he could be disparaging
the ‘human life’ by describing it as ‘mere’ which emphasizes how small
or insignificant something could be. And because
the value was being accorded to each life which gives the impression that there
is some higher being deciding what a life would be worth. It is almost as if
they do not care about the lives they are killing anymore, they are just
following orders and defending themselves. Stephen
also “watched men harden to the mechanical slaughter. There seemed to him a
great breach of nature which no one had the power to stop.” Which makes them appear like machines,
not human any more because they are becoming ‘harder’, tougher and
desensitizing to the chaos they are watching. Then the ‘mechanical’ part is
like a habit or routine, that performs automatically like a machine would, that
shows what the soldiers have become due to the inhumanity they have experienced
and carried out themselves. Also the ‘slaughter’ is normally the killing of a
large amount of people like a massacre and generally refers to an animal which
again takes away their humanity. 'Breach' is something breaking or falling, like
a river breaches its bank when the water gets too much for the bank to cope
with, which might be reminiscent of what is happening with the war. Which also fits with the 'pouring' metaphor because they are both like water or a stream flowing out.
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