Beasts 74-116

This part of the book was the biggest section we had to read. With a big section comes lots of important details. In my paper, I discussed the ill-effects of war and how it effects multiple components in life. The one component that was talked about in the book was nature. Agu talks about a palm tree that gives wine and oil. He says that this is a great palm tree, but the soldiers tear it apart because they need its branches for shelter. The army ruined the tree and destroyed the surrounding land. Not only does war ruin families, individuals and societies, it also ruins nature. 

The group also talked about the lack of food and what some of the soldiers needed to resort to. Commandant talks about how he used to eat humans. Cannibalism was a method used by many of the soldiers in the army. I also saw that Agu was dependent on the army because of what the army could provide for him. They gave him food which was necessary for Agu to function. 

An interesting part came up in the book that shocked me when I first read it. Commandant raped Agu and Strika. I had some serious problems with this. Commandant is a fatherly figure to Agu and for him to do such an act to Agu just astounds me. I also had one important question: what was Commandant's motivation for doing this? This wasn't really answered in the group and the only possible explanation was that Commandant wanted to show that he was in charge. There was an argument in the group when Dylan told me he thought Commandant felt bad for raping Agu. I disagreed and said that there is no way that he does something like that and then feels bad. It wasn't a simple mistake, it was definitely pre-meditated. 

I also saw that Commandant was killing people because he thought they were traitors when in reality they really weren't. This shows that he is paranoid and as the war keeps going on, he will just get more and more irritated. But this moment in the novel reminded me of the movie called The Last King of Scotland. Basically the movie is about a man who replaces a president in Uganda who was overthrown and the whole time during his administration he was worried about a rebellion. He killed thousands of Ugandans to keep himself at ease.