There is a second side to the issue of morality as it is presented in The Things They Carried that is reflected in the novel by J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians. This is the aspect of toleration to immorality and is also tied to the issue of unusual and chaotic circumstances. While in Macbeth, there is something to be said for Banquo’s brief toleration of something he suspected as wrong and certainly and toleration to immorality is witnessed repeatedly in O’Brien’s novel with soldiers who were insensitive to an almost absurdly cruel degree and that the “good” characters had to tolerate and consider. In Macbeth and The Things They Carried, toleration to questionable actions and decisions was forced as a result of the situations of war, alliances, and necessity but in Coetzee’s novel, toleration to extreme immoral brutality first becomes a passive annoyance and eventually leads to ultimate breakdown of moral sense. In terms of realizing the significance of morality in chaotic situations, Macbeth is forced to live the consequences of his immorality while more passive characters such as Tim and the magistrate from Coetzee’s novel endlessly try to work through massive inhumanity. “Evoking the compulsive repetitions of traumatic memory, the narrator in The Things They Carried characterizes stories not as the road to closure, but as “obsession,” a kind of psychological traffic” (Blyn 190). For that narrator, writing is the cathartic way to manage immorality whereas in the case of the magistrate, the psychological traffic is within the self, imprisoned mentally and literally, and through the medium of his barbarian woman.

The magistrate is a fascinating, complex character for such a simple man. He wishes nothing more than to enjoy his life, be comfortable, and live out his days until retirement without upsetting the system. He is not a man who wishes harm upon anyone, much like Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried and also like Tim, the forced nature of intense moral issues brought about by unnatural chaotic situations causes a significant sense of disruption and disconnection from reality and what living a good life really means. Before the magistrate begins to question what the purpose of life is as a result of the extreme brutality and inhumanity he witnesses, his needs and wants are simple and include living a good life but once the ability to tolerate enough to just get by erodes and chaos is complete, morality takes an interesting form. For the magistrate, he finds ways to accommodate the guilt he feels over his early toleration of the massive brutality and inhumanity of a cruel military leader in search of an elusive truth. He talks about the girl he keeps and although he bathes and caresses her as a lover would, he states, “I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate…If a change in my moral being were occurring I would feel it” (Coetzee 43). It is at this point that the magistrate seems to connect with both ends of the spectrum of morality. He is presented daily with the possibility of being extremely cruel, if not only for the sake of cruelty itself, but on the other hand, this witnessed lack of morality and the chaos it creates allows him to see the entirely opposite end of the spectrum of morality; ultimate good. In this case, it is a sense of good without real cause outside of a way to manage guilt and cope with the chaos.

There are distinct differences between the magistrate and Colonel Joll. The Colonel is an “emblem of the estrangement of knowledge and law, of law and justice. The magistrate, whose eyes are open to the sun, espouses the humanistic values of knowledge and justice, but he no longer represents Law in the frontier town; he is powerless” (Castillo 1986). In this sense, the Colonel and Macbeth have something in common and certainly, with this suggestion in mind, Tim and the magistrate can be paralleled in terms of their collective reactions to inhumanity, mass immorality, and indignity in the event of chaos, war, and disorder. Unlike the character of Macbeth who is unwittingly seeking out the highest level of immorality, the magistrate in Coetzee’s novel is much like O’Brien; a highly conscious observer and processor of atrocity; an unwilling passive participant in something grotesquely inhuman and immoral, forced into action only when it is vital. Whereas O’Brien’s moment of crushing action was when he launched the grenade and killed the young man, even though he did not have any feelings of animosity toward him, the magistrate’s moment of moral clarity in the context of chaos happens slowly and begins with the girl, eventually branching outwards until a strange kind of myopia sets in that turns him into a strange homeless wandering man out of place in his society, although at an peace with himself. It can thus be said the experience of war for men who are concerned with moral issues more generally, can be crippling and contorts what is and is not just. For Macbeth, the influences of cruel suggestions and the dangling possibility of power acted as the impetus to shed morality. While these are different in terms of situations and settings, the constant factor is the reconsideration and reordering of moral principles and decision-making processes under the strain of the absurd, cruel, tempting, and unimaginable.

Works Cited

Blyn, Robin. “O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.” Explicator 61.3 (2003), 189-191
Castillo, Debra A. “The Composition of the Self in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians.” Critique 27.2 (1986), 78-90
Coetzee, J.M. Waiting for the Barbarians. New York: Penguin, 1982.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Broadway, 1998.
Shakespeare, William Macbeth New York: Harper, 2006.