The context of the war is only one of two contexts in the story. As we noted, the war serves as a metaphor for the natural order within which people struggle and die. The second context is the hospital, within which the issue at hand is the healing of those persons who have been wounded within the war-context. By extending these metaphors, we might suggest that the narrator's stake in his narrative is the resolution of how to be healed or how to be rejoined to a world characterized by destruction and death. The healing machines could not make him physically whole again, and he recalls that he could never be a hunting hawk; consequently, two of the three modes of survival in a destructive element failed to work.

Juxtaposed with the narrator's certainty that he was not a hunting hawk is his first comment about the...