Morphine In Three Day Road

As suggested by Joseph Boyden in Three Day Road, the battle against addiction helped guide the course of restoring honour and certainty with forgiveness (healing), memories, and friendship. In addition to how morphine helped set the plot into motion, morphine also put a negative spin on the characters and plot. It is important for an individual to find healthy ways to heal after being exposed to such tragedies. When an individual overcomes these past adversities they will come to a new point of view in their life, such as Xavier had. Morphine corrupted Elijah and turned him into an emotionless killing sniper. He had soon lost his identity and consciousness. Elijah would use the morphine to escape the harsh realities of the present. Elijah was …show more content…
This unhealthy addiction would not allow Elijah to restore his honour and certainty, therefore leading to him being emotionally broken. The need for killing consumed Xavier when he realized that “only a few needlefulls [were] left, and he [did] not know what [he was going to do] when it [was] gone”.(page 164) In a way, the morphine stabilized Elijah from the madness, as he would use and abuse it to stabilize and or enhance his senses. On the other hand, without it he would become scared of his surroundings and use the morphine more frequently. One “the golden liquid” was in Elijah’s veins, he would no longer have fear nor pain. The “morphine allowed [Elijah] to leave his body and see what was around [him]”. (page 118) The war had serious effects on Elijah, as he soon was feeding off of the fear and madness of the place. Elijah soon had resorted to his fascination and addiction to morphine. With given the idea to gather scalps from his kills to gain respect and have evidence of them, Elijah soon did this. After a serious addiction to morphine and loss of reality, Elijah soon started to become windigo (eating another human, cannibalism). At this point, you knew that Elijah had gone crazy, as no sane person would do that unimaginable task. In addition to that, Elijah was opening the eyes of dead soldiers, so that the …show more content…
Others saw Elijah as a charismatic, a great sniper, and a happy guy. Xavier saw through this fake front and could see that Elijah was sad and emotionally unstable. Xavier throughout the book tries to pull Elijah back into the light, but unfortunately was unable to. Though the morphine did have some serious effects on Elijah, there were other items that may have psychologically distressed him. When Elijah was younger he was beaten in residential school and lost his mother. The competition put a wedge between them when it came to sniper competition, because Xavier was jealous of Elijah and let it get to him. With the jealousy, Xavier decided he “wanted to do this do this by [himself]”.(page 208) To Elijah he saw no consequences with the morphine, due to his great fascination and addiction taking over his thoughts. In the end, Elijah and Xavier’s relationship was unsalvageable due to Elijah’s great addiction to the morphine. Xavier and Elijah “[were] great hunters and friends”, (page 2) but war had changed this all. In the end, Xavier had to kill Elijah as he was beyond repair and completely