The Narrow Road to the Deep North

When the Goanna grows tired of beating Darky, two other guards take over. The men who are forced to watch try to think of their favorite memories. After 10 minutes, the Goanna forces them all to step six paces closer. Now there is no way for them to ignore the beating. Darky begs them for help: “The prisoners were starving, and increasingly their thoughts were of the evening meal” (254). They cannot eat until the beating is over. More men arrive from the Line and soon there are over 300 of them watching the beating.

Dorrigo runs towards them, commanding the beating to stop. A guard pushes him into the front line then ignores him. 

Nakamura gets no pleasure from the beating. He is anxious for a shabu pill, a narcotic to which he has become addicted: “The pain brought on in him by such suffering as he had ordered proved to him how deeply he was a good and gentle man” (256). He notices that the Goanna does not seem to be putting all his force into the blows, and this annoys him. Nakamura turns to Fukuhara, intending to end the punishment, but he slips and falls, smearing his face and shirt with mud. He stands, takes a pick handle, and orders the Goanna to stand at attention. He then strikes him in the kidney, the neck, and the head with the handle. The Goanna then beats Darky savagely. 

Dorrigo watches Nakamura:

[He] no longer seemed the strange but human officer he had played cards with the night before, not the harsh but pragmatic commander he had bartered lives with that morning, but the terrifying force that takes holds of individuals, groups, nations, and bends and warps them against their natures, against their judgments, and destroys all before it with a careless fatalism (261).

As he watches the beating, he thinks of horror in the world: “It was as if man existed only to transmit violence to ensure its domain is eternal” (263). He sees that all history is a history of violence. The beating is still going on an hour later. 

Darky thinks of his mother during the beating and tries to pull himself towards her. He hears something that sounds like the sea: “Not the sea!” (265), he thinks repeatedly, without understanding why the thought of the sea makes him feel such terror. 

That night they find Darky headfirst in the latrine; he apparently fell in after crawling there from the hospital. They carry the body to the hospital, wash it, and prepare it for burial the next day: “It had been a day to die, not because it was a special day but because it wasn’t, and every day was a day to die now” (266). Each man has questions that he cannot answer, but as they look at each other, they each realize that they had only each other: “There could be no I or me, only we and us” (266). 

The next morning, Rooster feels guilty. He was the one who persuaded the men not to work, not Darky. But when he had been tempted to accept the blame, he had remembered Darky laughing about the eggshell on Tiny’s erection. As he picks up his copy of Mein Kampf, he feels something in the pocket of the dress shirt lying nearby. It is a duck egg. He realizes that the duck egg Darky had stolen had not been his. 

Years later, Jimmy Bigelow will always insist that his children fold their clothes and blankets with the fold out, remembering the rifle butts to the head that could accompany any breach of the rules in the camp. Sometimes he will wonder if he has lost the capacity for love; then “he would watch his children playing outside in the sun. Ashamed. Amazed. It was always sunny” (268).

Weeks after the end of the war, the Japanese abandon the Line; it is pulled up and sold. Foliage would eventually cover it: “For the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained. People kept on longing for meaning and hope, but the annals of the past are a muddy story of chaos only” (270).