The Passion

Early on in The Passion, a little girl asks Henri if he will kill people in the war. Henri replies that he will just kill the enemy. She asks him what an enemy is. He replies, “Someone who is not on your side” (6), thus showing how war reduces people to good or evil, friend or foe. Later in The Passion, Domino warns Henri of the necessity of living only for the present. Henri toys with this idea when thinking about the uniqueness of snowflakes, wondering, “if that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we recover from the wonder of it?” (41). After 2,000 soldiers are killed on Napoleon’s whim, Henri ponders the usefulness of living only in the present as a way to ignore the atrocities that have been committed. Though he’s haunted by the deaths of his fellow soldiers, Henri tries to use this philosophy to put the tragedy out of mind. Later, Henri expands this idea of remaining in the moment to justify a soldier’s need to live without a heart: “It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead.