Kavalier & Clay - Antarctica: Searching for Peace through War

Joe's Antarctic posting in Part Five is an interjection in the story which takes the theme of escape to an entirely new scale. We can apply to this section a Kornblumian maxim recited all the way back in Part One, Chapter Two: "'"Forget about what you are escaping from...Reserve your anxiety for what you are escaping to"'" (21). What is it, then, that Joe felt so compelled to escape from that he (albeit unwittingly) traveled so many thousands of miles, and what did he hope to find there?

It would be easy to believe that Joe's sole motivation for his enlistment is pure, unmitigated rage and hatred for all things German following his brother's death. Such a factor ought not to be ignored, certainly; though we must caution ourselves from oversimplification of something as complex as the human emotional psyche. Rage can blind and overpower an individual. But so can love, so can hope, so can fear so can any emotion if we let them. And even if we don't, various combinations of these emotions may still produce the same effect. Such is the case of Joe and his impulsive naval initiation. Yes, he wants to kill Germans. That desire has been clear, or at least just below the surface, ever since the Escapist's Hitler-punching debut. But also not to be disregarded are his senses of fear, shame, and hopelessness which are ignited alongside his rage following the sinking of the Ark of Miriam. Joe's goal in America was always to bring his family across the Atlantic, to break them free from the chains of Nazi-occupied Prague. They are his reason for pursuing "'the big money'" (71). But after Tommy's death that clear objective becomes muddied, and Joe is left in want of a new purpose; one that will take him away from the land that has offered him nothing but false hope. 

This purpose becomes, quite simply, destruction. Be it ideally of the Germans, or even of himself, Joe seeks to take from the world because the world has taken from him. After all, it does not stand to reason that Joe would venture across a thousand miles of Antarctic ice in a plane wrapped in seal and dog hides, alone after his pilot-qualified partner succumbed to appendicitis, all the while battling the freezing and perilous continent itself all for the sake of putting a bullet in one German geologist. In the context of this absurd mission, the letter Joe left behind at Kelvinator Station for the provision of his death seems less like a responsible attempt to get his affairs in order than it does a suicide note. In Joe's recklessness we see a man who would have been all too happy to see his little brother once again, in whatever spiritual plane that may be.