Men in the Sun

"...He tried to finish climbing into the lorry, but didn't feel strong enough. He thought that his head would explode. All the exhaustion which he felt suddenly rose to his head and began to hum in it, and so he put his head in his hands and began to pull his hair to expel the thought. But it was still there, huge and resounding, unshakeable and inescapable [...] All at once he could no longer keep it within his head, and he dropped his hands to his sides and stared into the darkness with his eyes wide open.

"The thought slipped from his mind and ran onto his tongue: "Why didn't you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn't you say anything? Why?"

The desert suddenly began to send back the echo:

"Why didn't you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn't you bang the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why? Why?"

-Taken from the final page of Ghassan Kanafani's Men in the Sun.

I'm sure I wasn't the only person to sit down and read this in an hour because I couldn't stop reading about halfway through it. Though the idea of smuggling and being utterly and totally poor in a barren land may be foreign to most of us in this class, the story was quite exciting, and it ended quickly and abruptly, with an echo in the dark desert nighttime sky.

I also really enjoyed the way Kanafani found a way to give each character some background, but not dwell too heavily on each, being that the story only lasts for about 60 pages. Character development was over before you knew it, and each one brought something different to the table.

One of the prevailing themes of this story was the idea of 'honor' and 'swearing on your honor'. How little it meant to the thief who could 'swear on his honor', take the person's money, and then never see them again because they would never make it out of the desert without his help (which was never coming, mind you). Even the character with seemingly the most honorable of intentions, Abul Khaizuran, ended up letting the three men die within his care. What is honor, really?

I'm excited to begin discussion on this. It was a great read, and I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as me :)

See you later!
-Dan