As i near the end of the novel Life Class by Pat Barker, I've begun to analyze more and more the character Paul Tarrant. After leaving the safety of his art studio in England, Paul enlisted in the army and got involved as a doctor to those who were injured and close to death. This is a huge step for Paul because he goes from a sheltered life of probing questions of life to the real world that asks the question of 'life or death'. After dealing with many people dying in his arms, when Paul talks with Lewis his roommate, he recognizes his own change in tone of the topic of death. When Lewis asks a question about how many patients die, Paul answers in a statistics, and marks his own changing perspective, "Paul realized Lewis was questioning his coldblooded way of talking about [death]"(172) As a reader, I feel a distance from Paul as he becomes more and more desensitized to the emotional topic of death, this is the apparent goal of Pat Barker.
Continuing on this page, Barker further describes Paul's mind-process as he thinks nothing of 'who the people are' that are dying rather than thinking of numbers of open beds for more patients to be dropped off. Barker speaks through Paul's eyes, "He couldn't remember any of the people who died. Not their faces. Only their positions in the huts so that he could direct the next batch of bodies that were being delivered on stretchers to open-beds"(172). Paul refers to humans as "batches of bodies" and clearly illustrates his distance and isolation within the medical huts, as her works as efficiently and as unattached as possible.
Throughout the novel I've noticed Paul's ever changing perspective as he searches to find himself he many times gets lost in the ruckus of what's going on around him, especially when he's off working at war.
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