Let's talk about Enemies first.
So these guys Dave Jensen and Lee Strunk get into a fist fight over a missing jack knife, and Dave is huge, so he ends up "winning" the fight, breaking Strunks' nose. But then Dave gets all paranoid about Lee's whereabouts and actions, I presume, and ends up going into a fit of passion and breaks his own nose, so that they'll be even, deleting the need for Lee to end up getting Dave back.
Friends:
So now Dave and Lee from the previous chapter come to trust each other a great deal, and make a pact about how if the other person got "totally fucked up" (i.e. getting shot in a way that would make them wheelchair bound), they would end their life for them. But then Lee gets shot in the leg, and tells Jensen not to kill him, and makes him swear
So what do you think of this? How is war responsible for both the crime and the paranoid response to it? Does war create an environment where trust is always suspect (as was mentioned in class)? Can it also offer up the other extreme--feelings of extraordinary trust? In this way the novel might show "dichotomies" which could also be called contradictions or paradoxes. It would seem that a world like this would be confusing and chaotic to say the least.
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