One

For this next blog, I wanted to accomplish two things: first, I felt from my last poetry blog on post-World War I disillusionment that I ought to explore that idea again here, and second, to explore the ideas of loneliness, isolation, and the conceptual conflict between truth and illusion as are constantly found in Invisible Man which we are currently studying in class. To accomplish both these tasks, I looked to the lyrics of Metallica once again, this time those of “One”, a dreary thrash ballad with a powerful message hidden behind the words. The song’s lyrics are based off of the 1939 novel, Johnny Got His Gun by David Trumbo, ironically written the same year of the breakout of the Second World War. The story follows a World War I soldier who is hit by a landmine and nearly killed but survives despite having lost his arms, legs, eyes, ears, and mouth, with his brain and mind kept perfectly intact, leaving him a prisoner of his mind. The impending result of such a horrendous atrocity of the war is a person who is trapped within himself, doomed to suffer from loneliness for the rest of his life, his only companion being his sporadic thoughts and dreams. The opening lyrics paint a chilling picture of the soldier’s condition, saying, “I can’t remember anything, can’t tell if this is true or dream, deep down inside I feel to scream, this terrible silence stops me”. Of these lines, the second about truth and dream, or rather what is and what seems, is what stood out to me, as like the anonymous narrator in Invisible Man, one of the greatest tragedies of life is not knowing how to tell the difference between the two, or worse, believing that a dream is the truth or vice versa. The disabled soldier is trapped in his own darkened mind, unable to experience the light of truth, and as a result can never know what is actually real. As the lyrics continue, it is revealed that there is one truth that the soldier knows: “There is not much left of me, nothing is real but pain now”. Pain, torment, and discomfort are the only truths that the soldier can ever identify with now because he has been denied everything that would have allowed him to experience any other sort of truth. Looking at this from a historical perspective, this is perhaps the greatest attribute of post-WWI disillusionment of the “Lost Generation”, that they had been exposed to what the world was really like. Four horrible years of a stalemated battle of trench warfare along the French border taught countless soldiers what life really consisted of, which was pain, suffering, and ultimately death. The chorus reveals the agony of what the war has brought on to the soldier, as he cries out, “Hold my breath as I wish for death, Oh please, God, wake me”. From a literary perspective, these lines are an interesting way to look at what the real nature of truth is. The soldier says “wake me”, alluding to him being caught within the illusion of his own mind as a result of his impairment, but if he were to be “awoken”, what would he wake up to? As countless other writers of the time like Hemingway and TS Eliot noted through their own works, the truth of the world that the soldier wishes to wake up to is not much better than the confines of his mind, as it is equally filled with pain, discomfort, and sorrow. Essentially, whether in the illusion of the mind or in the light of reality, there is no escape from pain, for it is a horror that plagues both imagination and reality. In a final analytical note, it is necessary to look at the line of the second chorus, “Now the world is gone, I’m just one”. Following the soldier’s failed suicide attempt after his tracheotomy and his denied request to be displayed on a tour to show people the physical atrocities of war, the soldier realizes that his destiny is in his hospital bed, the world essentially having past away from him and being the only “one” left. His fate is to fully experience isolation and loneliness, to never again be a part of the world, his only memory of it being of all the pain and suffering that it caused him. Ultimately, he will be “one” with torment and the bitter memories of the past. As the doctor puts it in the film, “This young man will be as unfeeling as the dead until the day he joins them”.