Dominant Symbol

In On the Rainy River, the main character described his gruesome job of declotting pig carcasses in a meat factory, receiving daily blood-showers. He explained the perpetual stench that would never go away, no matter how hard he scrubbed at it. This can be seen as a symbol of the war, of the impossibility to get rid of the remorse and overbearing guilt of participation and unjustified killing.

My visual representation of this symbol is Pig-Pen, a character in the comic-strip and television series Peanuts, who has a perpetual cloud of stench and filth surrounding him. No matter what he does about it, the cloud will not go away.

Pig-Pen represents Tim O’Brien’s literal inability to remove the smell of pig from his body, as well as the figurative incapability to remove the war’s oppressive influence on his conscience.