His pain is too immense, his shame too deep, and his wish to obliterate himself too compelling; in this way, Cody, deep down, reminds Sister Jamison of herself.
The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal — the one that was, ironically enough, inherited — was the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus, in some sense, to obliterate himself.
You write, "The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal the one that was, ironically, enough, inherited was the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus, in some sense, to obliterate himself".
Certainly Walser was primarily concerned with overcoming his inhibitions about writing by means of the less definitive "pencil method"; and it is equally certain that unconsciously, as Werner Morlang notes, he was seeking to hide, behind the indecipherable characters, "from both public and internalized instances of evaluation," to duck down below the level of language and to obliterate himself.
One response seems particularly apropos for our discussion of "Down and Out in Paris and London": You write, "The real struggle for this puritan masochist, the one that was personal — the one that was, ironically, enough, inherited — was the struggle to obliterate privilege, and thus, in some sense, to obliterate himself".
He knew that he was in a fragile state, but, at the loss of her, he had the brief feeling that he had left his body, a sense of such overwhelming despair that he wanted to obliterate himself from the earth.
And he obliterated himself.
Sorensen all but obliterates himself from the anecdote.
As events rush to their conclusion, the audience knows that Othello's naïve trust in outward appearances, his "free and open nature," as Iago contemptuously calls it, not only feeds Iago's ego but also leads Othello to be untrue to himself and obliterate everything he cherishes.
Rather than abort the mission, Loring continued his diving run, aiming his disabled aircraft at the position and obliterating it, killing himself in the process.
In a characteristic display of rhetorical excess, the general thundered a few days later to a Southern woman that "God himself has obliterated whole races from the face of the earth for sins less heinous" than the acts he was punishing.
