War's corruption of morality in "The Killers and the Compass"

Effects of War on the Characters
Part One
From “The Killers and the Compass”
Passage 1. “You have to learn how to make yourself God in this world” (p. 13).
This is what Abu Hadid says to his younger brother in the beginning of the story. He means to say that in a war-torn world, you have to make yourself feared because it is either be feared and make others serve you or be afraid and serve others. There is an obvious rejection of traditional morality in Abu Hadid’s philosophy. He is one who believes that one determines his own fate, that one should be his own superman, his own God, as he puts it.
Passage 2. “My father would assail her with a hail of insults, and when her endurance broke she would whine aloud, “Why, good Lord? Why? Take me and save me.” Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out of his headdress, and whip her nonstop for half an hour, spitting at her throughout” (p. 14).
This passage shows that Abu Hadid grew up surrounded by violence even in his own home. His own father would pull out of his own person a weapon with which to beat his mother. It showed that the only attitude that the boys learned was an attitude of hostility and aggression, that one should interact with human beings in no other way.
Passage 3. “He thumped the arak bottle against the wall and aimed a friendly punch hard into my nose” (p. 14).
This shows that the violence from Abu Hadid even has affectionate undertones, according to the narrator. Later the narrator’s shirt is all bloody and he needs a new one because of the punch from his brother. It shows his brother is a menace, torn between loving affection and hateful violence, sometimes confusingly mixing the two into a single gesture. He means the punch to be a show of brotherly affection—but it is too hard, too forceful, and it ends up leaving his brother a bloody mess.
Passage 4. “They jumped through the window of Abu Rihab’s abandoned house. The rubbish almost reached the roof of the place. The government had executed Abu Rihab and confiscated his house” (15).
Obviously Iraq is a mess—the homes are abandoned and discarded and rubbish is everywhere. The government executes anyone it considers a threat. Then it takes ownership of the person’s family’s home—but nothing is ever done with the home. It is wasted—and that presents an object lesson to people like Abu Hadid and his brother: there is no rhyme or reason to anything. So clearly there is no God for them—they live in Hell, so might as well pretend that one is God for a little while.
Passage 5. “He used to give me and the gang pills in return for puncturing the tires of cars in the neighborhood, so that his business would flourish” (16).
This passage shows the degeneracy of the neighborhood: there is no such thing as honest business. Everyone is out to scam someone else. If there is no business for a repair man, he pays street thugs to drum up business for him by smashing and destroying others’ property. There is no respect for one’s property. There is only self-interest and emptiness.
Passage 6: “Do you think the fish are happy in the tank?” my brother asked, calm and serious. “As long as they eat and drink and swim, they’re fine,” the man replied, without looking away from the television screen” (18).
The life of the fish in the aquarium is a reflection of Abu Hadid’s life. He feels trapped in an aquarium—an empty fish bowl with nothing in it. He swims in violence and hostility the way the fish swims in water. Yet the fish is not sustained by the water itself. The fish needs the owner to feed and nourish him. The fish needs something external to himself because he is not God and cannot rely on himself for his own nourishment. The fish relies on something greater than itself. This is what disturbs Abu Hadid. If the fish in the bowl is an accurate allegory, then he is no more powerful and in control of his own life than the fish. He is not nourished by the violence in which he swims just as the fish needs more than water. Abu Hadid can swim in it, but he cannot be sustained by it. It is one of the few times Abu Hadid is concerned with a theological question. He wants to know how the fish can drink salt water. It is the same as his asking how one can drink violence and be sustained. He drinks violence and gives it because he believes there is nothing more. But the fish in the bowl shows that he is trapped, too, like the fish and there is something greater than himself but he does not want to admit it because then he is admitting that he is not God—and that thought is more terrible to him than any other thought—which is why he attacks the owner of the fish bowl. It is his way of attacking God and keeping him at a distance.
Passage 7: “Listen, Mahdi. Some years back I took the plunge and escaped to Iran. I was thinking of going from there into Turkey and putting this fucked-up country behind me” (19).
Abu Hadid’s friend admits that Iraq is a no-good place and that he too wants to get away from it. The story he tells, however, shows that the world is no better in Iran or anywhere else because it is full of cruel, evil people who will beat and torture and kill every chance they get. Even the poor boy Waheed is not spared as he hangs himself to escape the misery of the world. The moral of the story that Murad Harba tells Mahdi is that life is cruel and one must be tough to survive.
Passage 8: “Within a few minutes the plaster set hard and Waheed’s arms were trapped in the barrel. The Afghans pulled down Waheed’s trousers and raped him one by one” (22).
This is the conclusion of Murad Harba’s story about Waheed. It shows that there is nothing but callousness and hatred in the world and that people are not worth anything. It is meant to reinforce the idea that killing people is not bad because people themselves in general are not good. Only Waheed seems an innocent and to preserve one’s innocence one must be hard like the plaster and indifferent to killing.
Passage 9: “The story about the Pakistani had no effect on me.”
Mahdi is already indifferent to the cruelty of the world. He is already absorbing the spirit of his older brother. While Murad Harba curses God at the end of the story, Mahdi does nothing but absorb it all as natural. He too is destined to be a killer like his brother because there is nothing else.
Passage 10: “Now you’re God.”
This is what Abu Hadid tells his younger brother. It means that Mahdi is now like his brother—a killer—and that now he is in control of his own life. He should never trust anyone or even think about being kind to anyone since it is clear to them, from their angry perspective, that God is not kind to anyone in their land.
From Bodies
Passage 1: “I remember thinking how glad I was that Rachel wasn’t the kind of girl to send me something like that” (56).
Famous last words. The narrator has to eat them literally when she does send him pictures. It indicates a sense of decency in the narrator, decency that is utterly lacking in the Marine Corps.
Passage 2: “I’m not crazy, you are!” (56).
This is what the narrator is forced to scream at himself in the mirror by his kill hat. It shows how insane the Marines is and how it is a nest of venom and monstrosity. They are training people to be crazy.
Passage 3: “He told them they were all fucked up if they would tolerate an individual like me in their platoon” (56).
More evidence that the Marines are insane: the narrator is a decent guy and here the kill hat is excoriating him to the others and telling them all that a real Marine would not only share naked pictures of his girl with the others but he would also let them run a train on her. The point the kill hat is making is that the Marines should come first—but it is a crazy way to make that point and full of violence and aggression.
Passage 4: “I don’t think it made me any better than anyone else” (57).
The narrator goes to Iraq hoping it will make him a man but it doesn’t do anything for him. He just ends up being the same guy without any meaning in his life.
Passage 5: “She looked up at me like she was scared, and I was also scared, but I knew what I was supposed to do.”
The narrator is about to have sex just because he feels he is supposed to. It has no meaning beyond that. It is just what his peer tells him to do.
Passage 6: “They ended up double-teaming some tourist, or at least they said they did. Either way, I’m glad I wasn’t there” (63).
The narrator shows his decency again. He is like a Holden Caufield type of character, despising his surroundings yet feeling trapped by them, unable to break free though he wants to.
Passage 7: “Listen,” I said again, “I need this” (66).
The narrator wants to lie down with Rachel just so he can have real human contact not with a drunk woman named 38 but with someone he was close to or at least connected to in the past. He shows he needs something human.
Passage 8: “Rachel starting tell me about him in a quiet voice…” (67).
The narrator is thinking he could have Rachel again but she blows that idea out of the water. She has another man in her life now.
Passage 9: “I want you to be disgusted” (71).
The narrator tells a man in the bar that he does not want to be respected for collecting bodies off the streets in the Marines. He feels there is nothing dignified in what he does.
Passage 10: “I never saw Rachel again but we’re Facebook friends” (71)
This shows the banality of it all—there is no real human connection for the narrator. His life is meaningless. He notes only that he has been deployed again and again. He is stuck on repeat.

Part Two
Godlessness and God-Wannabe’s in “Killers” and “Bodies
War is dehumanizing, as can be seen in the stories “The Killers and the Compass” by Hassan Blasim and “Bodies” by Phil Klay. Both stories are touched by war in Iraq. The former is told from the perspective of the younger brother of a stone-cold killer Arab in Iraq. The latter is told from the perspective of a U.S. Marine who collects dead bodies of the streets and has no meaning or real human connection in his life. Both worlds are devoid of human compassion, torn apart by the senseless atrocities of war, hostility, aggression and irrational violence. This paper will use the psychological approach to compare and contrast the ways war impacts the main characters in these two stories and show that in the case of the narrator of “Bodies” he is impacted mainly by a meaningless that extends from a kind of Godlessness, since God is never mentioned in his story at all. In the case of the narrator of the “Killers,” the character is impacted by God-wannabe’s like his brother Abu Hadid who desperately wants to be God so that he can be in control of his own destiny and the world around him by using violence to manipulate others and protect himself.
In “The Killers and the Compass,” Blasim writes that “You have to learn how to make yourself God in this world” (13). This is what Abu Hadid says to his younger brother in the beginning of the story. He means to say that in a war-torn world, you have to make yourself feared because it is either be feared and make others serve you or be afraid and serve others. There is an obvious rejection of traditional morality in Abu Hadid’s philosophy. He is one who believes that one determines his own fate, that one should be his own superman, his own God, as he puts it. In “Bodies,” there is no discussion of God. There is only the narrator telling his story, which is about how insane the Marine Corps life is and how he has no real human connection to anyone. He enlists in the Marines hoping it will give him something, improve his life, but he notes, “I don’t think it made me any better than anyone else” (Klay 57).
Life is not good for the narrator of “The Killers,” either and that is because his example on how to live comes from a sadistic older brother, who was informed himself by a sadistic father and a sadistic society: “My father would assail her with a hail of insults, and when her endurance broke she would whine aloud, ‘Why, good Lord? Why? Take me and save me.’ Only then would my father stand up, take the cord out of his headdress, and whip her nonstop for half an hour, spitting at her throughout,” writes Blasim (14). One can see that Abu Hadid grew up surrounded by violence even in his own home. His own father would pull out of his own person a weapon with which to beat his mother. It showed that the only attitude that the boys learned was an attitude of hostility and aggression, that one should interact with human beings in no other way. Abu Hadid’s Ego is thus informed by this type of violence. It is all around him in the world. The story of the innocent Waheed is more information for his Ego to find revolting and to think that he must be his own God to fend it all off and care for himself. He must be as violent and more, even crazier than the others, to be God: “Within a few minutes the plaster set hard and Waheed’s arms were trapped in the barrel. The Afghans pulled down Waheed’s trousers and raped him one by one” (Blasim 22). Such a fate for Waheed is not one Abu Hadid wants. His Ego would not permit it. And that is the lesson he is teaching his younger brother—to be God by killing others before they can hurt you or kill you. Thus, the conclusion of Murad Harba’s story about Waheed shows that there is nothing but callousness and hatred in the world and that people are not worth anything. It is meant to reinforce the idea that killing people is not bad because people themselves in general are not good. Only Waheed seems an innocent and to preserve one’s innocence one must be hard like the plaster and indifferent to killing.
The narrator of “Bodies” has no such Ego. His Ego is destroyed by the mundane world of his existence, by the meaninglessness of his job, by his detachment from others. He has been taught nothing about the purpose of life. He has no interactions with others except through meaningless sex. He is decent enough to understand it is meaningless and even shameful. He states of his colleague, “They ended up double-teaming some tourist, or at least they said they did. Either way, I’m glad I wasn’t there” (Klay 63). The narrator shows his decency by being glad he only had to take part in one meaningless sexual encounter because of his colleague. He is like a Holden Caufield type of character, despising his surroundings yet feeling trapped by them, unable to break free though he wants to. The war for him has done nothing—he hoped it would. Instead, his world was already decimated in his own small town. Meaning had been drained out of life for him in small town America.
Meaning for the narrator of “Killers” comes from gangsterism—from being self-centered. For instance, he tells the story of the local repair man: “He used to give me and the gang pills in return for puncturing the tires of cars in the neighborhood, so that his business would flourish” (Blasim 16). This passage shows the degeneracy of the neighborhood: there is no such thing as honest business. Everyone is out to scam someone else. If there is no business for a repair man, he pays street thugs to drum up business for him by smashing and destroying others’ property. There is no respect for one’s property. There is only self-interest and emptiness. It is so bad that his brother cannot help but compare himself to the fish (it is his Id and Superego pressing him into asking about the fish—his own Ego will not permit him to think of himself in this manner). “Do you think the fish are happy in the tank?” my brother asked, calm and serious. “As long as they eat and drink and swim, they’re fine,” the man replied, without looking away from the television screen” (Blasim 18). The life of the fish in the aquarium is a reflection of Abu Hadid’s inner life that he cannot acknowledge because it would show him how small he really is. He feels trapped in an aquarium—an empty fish bowl with nothing in it. He swims in violence and hostility the way the fish swims in water. Yet the fish is not sustained by the water itself. The fish needs the owner to feed and nourish him. The fish needs something external to himself because he is not God and cannot rely on himself for his own nourishment. The fish relies on something greater than itself. This is what disturbs Abu Hadid. If the fish in the bowl is an accurate allegory, then he is no more powerful and in control of his own life than the fish. He is not nourished by the violence in which he swims just as the fish needs more than water. Abu Hadid can swim in it, but he cannot be sustained by it. It is one of the few times Abu Hadid is concerned with a theological question. He wants to know how the fish can drink salt water. It is the same as his asking how one can drink violence and be sustained. He drinks violence and gives it because he believes there is nothing more. But the fish in the bowl shows that he is trapped, too, like the fish and there is something greater than himself but he does not want to admit it because then he is admitting that he is not God—and that thought is more terrible to him than any other thought—which is why he attacks the owner of the fish bowl. It is his way of attacking God and keeping him at a distance. He cannot let his Id force its way into his own conscious self.
For the narrator of “Bodies,” there is a similar problem with his Id, except it is telling him to connect to a person in a meaningful way and he does not understand it. He goes to see Rachel when he is on leave, but he does not know why or why he wants to be close to her. It is his Id communicating some desire that he cannot comprehend. Instead, he just says, “Listen…I need this” (Klay 66). The narrator wants to lie down with Rachel just so he can have real human contact not with a drunk woman named 38 but with someone he was close to or at least connected to in the past. He shows he needs something human. But even this does not work. Rachel starting telling me about him in a quiet voice…” (Klay 67). The narrator is thinking he could have Rachel again but she blows that idea out of the water. She has another man in her life now. So he leaves and goes back to his meaningless existence in a meaningless land where there is a meaningless war going on. “I never saw Rachel again but we’re Facebook friends,” he says (Klay 71). This shows the banality of it all—there is no real human connection for the narrator. His life is meaningless. He notes only that he has been deployed again and again. He is stuck on repeat. He has nothing, no purpose, no God, no meaning, no ultimate destination.
As for the narrator of “Killers,” he becomes an accomplice in a killing and is told by his brother, “Now you’re God.” This is what Abu Hadid tells his younger brother. It means that Mahdi is now like his brother—a killer—and that now he is in control of his own life. He should never trust anyone or even think about being kind to anyone since it is clear to them, from their angry perspective, that God is not kind to anyone in their land. They should be God. They do not realize they are devils only: it is like Satan thinking he should be God in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
In conclusion, these two stories are about godlessness and God-wannabe’s—characters who live in a war-torn world and have no God or who want to be God themselves so that they can be in control. The narrator in “Bodies,” wants to be connected to another human soul, but he does not even think about existence in a positive way. He is so numbed by his small town meaningless existence not even the war jars him out of it. He is too numb. In “Killers,” the character want to be God and so they kill others and try to control their own world through violence. They are more like devils, however.

Works Cited Blasim, Hassan. “The Killers and the Compass.” The Corpse Exhibition and Other Stories of Iraq. Penguin, 2014. 13-23. Klay, Phil. “Bodies.” Redeployment. Penguin Press, 2014. 53-71.