The titular story from Burowskis This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentleman is a remarkable work in that it questions to what degree individuals are complicit in the evil of group actions. If one were to simply describe the events of the story matter-of-factly, it is doubtful that anyone would really blame the unnamed narrator for doing what the Auschwitz officers force him to do. However, the glimpse into the narrators mind and emotions places more than a few shades of grey into the usual Manichean analysis of the Nazis as pure evil and those who opposed them as purely heroic. The narrator learns to hate the Jews, for example, on the purely irrational basis of the horrible work he must go through because the Nazis want to kill the Jews. In not judging its narrator, the work challenges readers to judge him in making its narrator nameless, of course, the book challenges readers to judge themselves and the actions they would have taken when confronted with those same horrors. While it could be argued that the failings of his narrator are simply an aspect of human nature, Burowski seems to be deliberately exploring the readiness man has to find an Other that can be defined as less than human. It is a chilling conceptthe idea that the wholesale murder he is complicit in may be less horrific because the victims of it are not quite human themselves. The ethical conundrum this brings is the question without a very clear answer how are sins of omission ethically weighed in scenarios when characters are literally helpless to change the outcome of a horrific situation The story walks a fine line between how active the narrator and others are in brutality, which provides a key for answering this conundrum.
The narrator seems guilty of at least one clear sin of omissionthat of following the so-called camp laws pact of silence and not answering the attractive girls question of what will happen to her and the rest of the Jews. In the face of the narrators silence, she deliberately places herself on the truck bound for the gas tank. This raises one question most prominently was her action an act of defiance, or an act of resignation This is the key to decoding the morality (or lack thereof) concerning the narrators inactionwhether he helped condemn an innocent woman to a needless death or was a spectator to an act of defiance braver than any he is capable of. Her word choicethat she knows where they are goingwould lend itself to the idea that hers is an act of defiance. She is illustrating to the narrator that even though she is in a position to be favored by the SS officers because of her beauty, she is choosing to die with them rather than be spared because of an arbitrary quality. Hers is an act of solidarity that makes us question the nature and extent of the narrators own rebellionwhy has he not been willing to lay down his life rather than be complicit in human suffering It is a provocative question, and one that questions the morality of the person who asks it after all, condemning murder in one breath and encouraging suicide in another is not a morally tenable ground. In this case, though, the answer is clear the actions of fellow prisonersmost particularly Andreiilluminate the need for the narrator to remain in the relatively unique moral position he is in.
As clich as it is, one might be inclined to forgive the narrator of his crimes because he was just following ordersdoubly so when they factor in the specter of death for anyone who opposes the SS officers. However, the narrators second unloading of the train car reveals an added brutality that goes beyond joylessly following his orders. It is, however, the behavior of Andrei that illuminates the moral necessity of the narrator keeping himself alive. The narrators moral failings have, at least so far, been limited to being slightly harsher to new prisoners and worrying about his own diminished empathy towards the Jews. Andrei, willing to attack a woman to curry favor with the SS officers, represents the horrible reality were the narrator to rebel and get himself killed, he would not stop the gears of Auschwitz, but would simply be replaced. And the next workers may either start off as unhinged as Andrei, or become that way over time. At that point, they are no longer inactive prisoners following orders, but active agents of additional human suffering. If only for this point, the narrator is obligated to keep himself alive, in the sense that he is able to mitigate human suffering by taking up a slot that might be filled by a more immoral individual. The notion of goodness in this work is not displayed as an aggregate, but evil is. In the face of aggregated evil, being apart from it is a victory in itself. However, from a moral and ethical standpoint, the question of whether that internal change in the narrator, regardless of the exterior actions he takes, tarnishes his soul to some degree.
This work is significant because it challenges Western notions about heroism and evil. First published one year after the war had ended, it challenged the narrative that was even then building into the mythos surrounding World War 2 that man will always find a way to unite and triumph over evil, and such an endeavor is enough to bring the entire world together. This work presents a different view that evil can and does triumph over some men, and the only way to combat it is not through guns or alliances, but in holding the line on ones own morality in the face of terror. Though the work is intentionally vague regarding judgments of the narrator, the audience is drawn into sympathy for the horrible situation he is placed in, forced to ask themselves how they would have reacted given the same circumstances. In this scenario, the narrators heroism is expressed more as the absence of evilhe avoids falling into the corruption that is all around him. In short if the worst thing that morally occurs to the man is a short-term hatred of the Jews, when others are willing to openly murder the Jews, shows a kind of strength and moral fiber. He is bent, but not broken his spirit needs to be replenished, not replaced. In this sense, the title is appropriate, as it deals with human beings trying to discover what they need in order to make it just a little bit farther.
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