Key Quote
“"they treated him as though he no longer existed"”
Beatrice Garland · Kamikaze
Focus: “no longer existed”
The pilot chose life over duty — and his family punished him with social death. He survives the war physically but is erased psychologically, treated as invisible by those he saved himself to return to.
Technique 1 — LITOTES & SOCIAL ANNIHILATION
The phrase 'as though he no longer existed' is a devastating litotes (understatement through negation) — rather than saying 'they rejected him' or 'they punished him', Garland uses the most extreme formulation possible: he ceases to exist. This is not physical death but social death — the pilot is alive but treated as nothing, which Garland suggests may be worse than the kamikaze mission he refused.
The word 'treated' implies a deliberate, sustained choice — this is not a momentary reaction but a permanent policy of erasure. The family's punishment mirrors the very ideology the pilot rejected: the Japanese honour code demanded self-annihilation for the Emperor; the family enacts a different kind of annihilation for his refusal. Either way, the individual is destroyed.
Key Words
RAD — REGRESS
The pilot's trajectory is one of devastating regression: from honoured warrior to social outcast. His decision to choose life should represent progress — a triumph of individual will over ideological programming. But the consequences are so severe that the poem questions whether his 'choice' was really a choice at all: every option led to a form of death. The pilot regresses from person to ghost — present but unacknowledged.
Key Words
Technique 2 — NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE SHIFT
Garland shifts between third-person narration ('Her father...') and the daughter's direct speech in the final lines. This perspectival shift moves from observed facts to personal, emotional truth — the daughter's quiet, devastating admission: 'he must have wondered / which had been the better way to die.' The shift from external to internal voice creates a structural intimacy that makes the ending unbearably poignant.
The central section — describing the pilot's vision of the sea ('the little fishing boats... the dark shoals of fishes') — uses extended natural imagery to represent what called him back. Nature, childhood memory, and beauty become the forces that override ideology. Garland juxtaposes the abstract (honour, duty, Emperor) with the concrete (fish, brothers, 'one-fingered salutes') to show that lived experience is more powerful than ideology — but that society punishes those who choose it.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
JAPANESE KAMIKAZE PILOTS
Kamikaze (literally 'divine wind') pilots were Japanese airmen in WWII who deliberately crashed their planes into Allied ships as suicide attacks. They were considered the highest expression of Bushido (the samurai code of honour) — sacrificing one's life for the Emperor was the ultimate duty. Approximately 3,800 pilots died in kamikaze missions. Those who turned back were treated as pariahs (outcasts) — shamed, shunned, and denied their identity.
HONOUR, SHAME & JAPANESE CULTURE
Japanese society operated under a rigid honour/shame code: the collective (family, community, nation) took absolute precedence over the individual. A soldier's refusal to die was not seen as self-preservation but as cowardice that brought shame on the entire family. Garland explores how cultural ideology can be so powerful that a family will erase a living member rather than acknowledge his 'dishonour'.
Key Words
WOW — INTERPELLATION & IDEOLOGICAL SUBJECTION (Althusser)
Louis Althusser's concept of interpellation describes how ideology 'hails' individuals into subject positions — calling them into roles they believe are natural and chosen. The kamikaze pilot was interpellated as a warrior, a patriot, a divine servant of the Emperor. His turn away from the mission represents a rare moment of dis-interpellation — a refusal to occupy the subject position ideology has created for him. But Althusser warns that there is no 'outside' of ideology: the pilot escapes military ideology only to be punished by familial ideology (the honour code), which proves equally totalising. Garland's genius is to show that the pilot's 'freedom' is illusory — he has exchanged one form of subjection (death for the state) for another (social death within the family). The poem thus asks a profoundly existentialist question: can an individual ever truly choose freely, or are we always choosing between competing systems of control? The final ambiguity — 'which had been the better way to die' — refuses to answer, leaving the reader in the same impossible position as the pilot.
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