In both Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Paul Horgan’s Mountain Standard Time there is a scene of violence. Both scenes feature hate crimes against individuals, where a group of people exert all their anger and frustration on a person. In Atonement, the scene features a soldier from the British Royal Air Force (RAF) being beaten to death by angered soldiers who experienced Dunkirk, they use the man as a punching bag, blaming him for their loss. In Mountain Standard Time, a little boy is riding his bike on a hot sunny day and reaches a mob of people who are forcing a man, after tying a rope around his neck, to kiss the American flag, accusing him of being a German spy. Both Incidents are similar because they show how humans love to hate and blame
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It was a sunny day for the boy in Mountain Standard Time. He just happened to be riding his bike, bumping into a mob of radical Americans humiliating an alleged German spy. This is a right of passage story. The boy has a real life graphic experience because of the violence he witnesses, watching a man get tortured and humiliated for just being. “I had no idea who the victim was or what he might have done...I never knew what became of him in the end-except that there was not actually a lynching, for of that there was no subsequent news. The power of many to abuse the one was all that I saw…” (70-75). The boy experiences dominance. He most likely had never seen someone so powerless in such an unfortunate situation. He is exposed to the power hatred can have on a group. None of these people have even been directly impacted by war, they are not soldiers! And yet evil of hate, anger, and savagery has reached them as well. Unlike this, there are actual soldiers in the Atonement story, who have in fact been personally affected by the war. The reason they direct all their hatred on them, like animals, is because the experience the war has given them was not so good. They believe they were supposed to receive a lot more help from the air force while they were fighting at Dunkirk, and for whatever the reason they did not, and so they suffered even more casualties, injuries and trauma than they were supposed to. So when they lost and returned from the battlefields, the only people to blame for the horrific experience was the air force. And so for the unluckiest pilot ever, being present in a crowd of these Dunkirk soldiers, is used as a scapegoat and beaten to death. Throughout the ordeal he is pestered with rhetorical question, “Where’s the R.A.F.?” (53). The men are pleasured by the torture of the man
It was a sunny day for the boy in Mountain Standard Time. He just happened to be riding his bike, bumping into a mob of radical Americans humiliating an alleged German spy. This is a right of passage story. The boy has a real life graphic experience because of the violence he witnesses, watching a man get tortured and humiliated for just being. “I had no idea who the victim was or what he might have done...I never knew what became of him in the end-except that there was not actually a lynching, for of that there was no subsequent news. The power of many to abuse the one was all that I saw…” (70-75). The boy experiences dominance. He most likely had never seen someone so powerless in such an unfortunate situation. He is exposed to the power hatred can have on a group. None of these people have even been directly impacted by war, they are not soldiers! And yet evil of hate, anger, and savagery has reached them as well. Unlike this, there are actual soldiers in the Atonement story, who have in fact been personally affected by the war. The reason they direct all their hatred on them, like animals, is because the experience the war has given them was not so good. They believe they were supposed to receive a lot more help from the air force while they were fighting at Dunkirk, and for whatever the reason they did not, and so they suffered even more casualties, injuries and trauma than they were supposed to. So when they lost and returned from the battlefields, the only people to blame for the horrific experience was the air force. And so for the unluckiest pilot ever, being present in a crowd of these Dunkirk soldiers, is used as a scapegoat and beaten to death. Throughout the ordeal he is pestered with rhetorical question, “Where’s the R.A.F.?” (53). The men are pleasured by the torture of the man