Monday, October 18, 2010
Just Lather, That's All - EQ - How are people transformed through their relationships with others?
Everyone has a good side, and we see this in the short story Just Lather, That's All, by Hernando Tellez. The main character, the barber, is faced with the dilemma of taking one life, or risk seeing countless others taken away. He has the chance to kill Captain Torres in cold blood and possibly ending the revolution, or letting him go and seeing the war continue. The barber's personality had been shaped through his relationships and ezperiences with others. It's possible that he had been brought up as an honest person by his parents and through the influence of his peers. This is what stopped the barber from slitting Torres' throat with his razor and letting him go unharmed. If he had killed him, maybe the revolution would have been over or at least in a lesser state or turmoil, but the barber would never have a clear conscience again for the rest of his life. He would have to live with the fact that he killed in cold blood. And again, as since his childhood, the barber's experience that day will change who he is and his identity as a whole.
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The short story “Just Lather, That’s All” is an excellent example of how our identity is portrayed, no matter what the situation is. The barber is clearly an honest man, which is part of his identity, and that does not change when he gets the chance to do his fellow rebels a favor by taking Captain Torres’ life due to the fact that he’s an honest man, just a barber, not a murderer. Why did he let Torres go? Why would he not want the gratitude of being a hero to his fellow rebels? Because of his experiences in life up to that day, his identity didn’t allow him to do it. It just wasn’t in the fabric of his being and his mind to be able to take another person’s life, especially in cold blood. The relationships the barber had with the people around him; his parents, teachers, friends and colleagues made him who he was up to that day and that didn’t change one bit over the course of that shave. The barber stayed true to himself and performed his job honourably, like an honest man would do. I know that if I were put in the barber’s position, I would have done exactly the same thing. Just like the barber, I just wouldn’t have it in me to take a life in cold-blood even if it were someone I know had done terrible things. I’m just not the type of person who could do that and I can see where the barber is coming from based on his decision.
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