CivilWarLand in Bad Decline

“Whenever a big potential investor comes for the tour the first thing I do is take him out to the transplanted Eerie Canal Lock. We’ve got a good ninety feet of actual Canal out there and a well-researched dioramic of a coolie campsite. Were our faces ever red when we found out it was actually the Irish who built the Canal. We’ve got no budget to correct, so every fifteen minutes or so a device in the bunkhouse gives off the approximate aroma of an Oriental meal.”

This is the first paragraph of the collection’s title story, and it’s telling that the first character introduced is “a potential big investor,” in that this choice places the importance of money and the wealthy above all else. We know little about setting and nothing about the protagonist at this point; instead, the investor comes first. The reader also gains a sense of the uncanny at the outset; things are familiar, but also made disorienting and strange.

“Possessing perfect knowledge I hover above as he hacks me to bits. I see his rough childhood. I see his mother doing something horrid to him with a broomstick. I see the hate in his heart and the people he has yet to kill before pneumonia gets him at eighty-three. I see the dead kid’s mom unable to sleep, pounding her fists against her face in grief at the moment I was burying her son’s hand. I see the pain I’ve caused. I see the man I could have been, and the man I was, and then everything is bright and new and keen with love and I sweep through Sam’s body, trying to change him, trying so hard, and feeling only hate and hate, solid as stone.”

This is the last paragraph of the collection’s title story. The protagonist, killed by Sam, is able to gain insight into his past. Saunders’s choice to include Sam’s backstory here is done in an effort to show that every action, even the most inhumane, often has reason and counterweight attached to it. This stands in contrast to simply calling a killer “evil,” as that is a way of not attaching logic to the act of murder and dismissing it as an act that exists without any possible sociological context. We also see the irony in the action of the protagonist trying to change Sam now that he’s dead, and it’s too late to make a difference.