Is Eli a Person?

[drakkar]

My gut feeling is that Eli is a person. Remember, Eli is a deseased boy. To me diseased humans are persons!
The Elephant man popped into my mind now, for some reason.

[Balb Kubrox]

People dont nom necks and twist off heads.

[cmfireflies]

I would have to add two other points, somewhat related, that have come home to me as a consequence of my participation in this forum for two years now, as a direct result of discussions about Eli's "morality." First, there are apparently more people out there who at least are prepared to believe, seemingly with little or no remorse, that they would repeatedly destroy the lives of "strangers" to sustain their own existence than I would have imagined. This has been somewhat of an eye-opener for me, and I am still unsure what to make of it. Second, there appear to be surprisingly few people who believe that man has the capacity to know or experience the Divine, or even believe that anything divine exists. On a personal level, I find this equally troubling.

As to the first point, I obviously can only speak of my own view on this sort of thing, but I don't think it's as bleak as you make it out to be. First of all, there is a disconnect between discussing fiction and discussion a hypothetical "real" situation. Like Pete said, the rate of people saying that they'll repeatedly kill to live will drop dramatically if forced to confront such a situation in real life. Just by changing the question to: "If a foreign power invaded, would you repeatedly sell out your countrymen to save your own skin?" I'm willing to bet the it would probably be 99% Nos.

But fictional beings are different. And this might be why Lacenaire thinks its pointless to talk about morality when fictional creatures are involved. A vampire, no matter how un-romanticized, how starkly realistically and miserably depicted, is more than a human who survives on blood and can't go into the sun. It's another species. And the number one goal of any species is to survive. Morality, quality of life, and all that comes after. Apologizes for not reading the entire thread, but some of the most chilling things I did read come from descriptions of people who regard other people as non-humans. This is the so close to pure evil that we don't even discuss it in polite society, but fiction gives us a safe way to think about such a situation. People here have a tendency to dismiss treating animals as if they have "moral rights" or are "moral patients" because hey, so many bad things are happening to fellow humans that it seems like an insult to human suffering that we talk about giving animals rights that people living in some countries don't currently have. (And some people dismiss the idea of inherent rights altogether: what we have we bled for and we have only that which we are willing to bleed for)

But we don't need to get that heavy, it's a forum for a story after all. So in the context of LtROI, I propose that the question isn't "Is Eli a person?" but rather, "Are we people to Eli?" The novel is comes closer to this, but aside from the cute love story, it's also a story of Eli coming to see Oskar first as food, then as a friend and equal, then as a loved one. We can understand this right? People, me included, scoff at the idea of treating animals equally to humans, but we probably have a pet that is part of the family, in other words, we'd be sadder for the death of the family dog than the death of a random stranger half a world away. And it has nothing to do with whether it's capable of feeling pain, or can abstractly understand right from wrong, if we spend enough time with something, we personalize it. Ever coaxed your laptop to run quicker? Talked to your car in traffic? Our attachment to things and animals are directly related to their proximity to us and their role in our lives.
Ask any pet owner and they'll say they understand their pets. Whether it's a snake, or a lizard, or a spider, I bet you that some people out there will say they have moods, have shown their owners kindness, are even "better" than other people. but do we suddenly stop destroying the rainforest because we don't want to harm the snakes? NO!

So back to my argument that people who say that they'll kill as vampires aren't psychopaths willing to throw you off the lifeboat just to save they own lives. Being a vampire means being a different species, and humans don't treat other species by how smart they are (if we did, eating pigs would be as barbaric as eating dogs). To a vampire, we're animals. It's good to be kind to animals, but if somehow our survival depended on killing every bird in the sky, well, we better start taking pictures now because we'd try our hardest to kill the buggers because it's us or them. You're not asking if we can live in peace with another sentient life-form, you're asking us to die so another species can live, and that's what's skewing the results.

Another reason is the romanticism that can't be separated from the vampire myth. We long for true love, and I maintain that loves means placing the welfare of one individual above the masses. You'd save your children first in a burning building right? The vampire myth allows us to imagine the logical extreme of that. Eli is lucky, we admire her and I'm jealous of her precisely because she found Oskar, who accepts her despite the fact that that acceptance means the deaths of numberless people. We are selfish. We want to be that important to our loved ones. Isn't it darkly sweet that Oskar kisses Eli with Lacke's blood on her lips? Isn't that the purest way of saying "I love you more than that guy's life?" Isn't that part of the attraction of the story? Or am I revealing that I am actually a horrible, horrible person?

Even without the love part, I think we'd like to imagine that our lives are worth living even under extreme circumstances. To say that "I will kill to live" demonstrates a kind of strength, it means that there is something worth living for in our lives that we would cling to life despite so much adversity. It's a way of saying "we love life" (Of course, this is the most positive spin I can put on it, there's plenty of bad reasons too, foremost is, "I really don't think killing is such a big deal" which is so evil, I'm going to say that it doesn't apply to any Infected.)

As for your second concern, I'm not touching that one.

[drakkar]

JAL's books are conveying their messages to me mostly trough emotions, moods and gut feelings. I guess that also makes me view the characthers the same way.

People dont nom necks and twist off heads.

And that statement dosen't change my gut feelings at all! ..part of the LTROI mystery, I guess.

[sauvin]

I would have to add two other points, somewhat related, that have come home to me as a consequence of my participation in this forum for two years now, as a direct result of discussions about Eli's "morality." First, there are apparently more people out there who at least are prepared to believe, seemingly with little or no remorse, that they would repeatedly destroy the lives of "strangers" to sustain their own existence than I would have imagined. This has been somewhat of an eye-opener for me, and I am still unsure what to make of it. Second, there appear to be surprisingly few people who believe that man has the capacity to know or experience the Divine, or even believe that anything divine exists. On a personal level, I find this equally troubling.

Before you go into a deep blue funk over how we perceive human nature in this forum, there are a couple of things I'd like you to try on for size.

First, as others have already pointed out, Eli is fictional. Eliform vampires do not exist as far as anybody is aware. This being the case, it's impossible to canvas Eliform vampires to see how much they might differ in their present states from their pre-turned states in any particular. We can't know how much any of us might be able or willing to sustain Eli's lifestyle, partly because we don't fully understand the mechanics of this particular transmogrification, and partly because nobody can really predict how he (or she) might react to extreme circumstances until they're hit in the face with them.

As an addendum to the first thing to try on for size, bear in mind that this forum attracts people who are enamoured of an unbearably cute little Swedish preteen vampire girl, and within this very forum, I have myself been surprised at the lengths people would go to, how much sheer denial people are willing to exhibit, in order to keep their pristinely ethereal image of her unsullied. I suspect a poll taken from a vastly larger general population would yield somewhat different results.

The second thing to try on for size involves stories some buddies who'd come back to the World after having served out their terms in the Nam. The few I knew hadn't wanted to go; they'd been conscripted. After surviving boot camp and going on to being stationed in Southeast Asia, they'd run across men who'd actually enlisted, and had to listen to these young "idiots" talking about how they're gonna go into the bush and kick some VC butt, gonna show the world just how fearsome the US military can be, gonna GLORY in killing those godless pinko commie child-raping bastards. They're gonna take their guns and kill VC by the solid cubic mile!

The young "idiots" fortunate enough to have survived with their bodies (mostly) intact and their minds (mostly) underanged sometimes came back to the World trying to remember just why the [deleted] they'd enlisted, what the godforsaken harebrained reason they thought they'd do anybody any good. "Talking [deleted]" was easy going into the war, something the seasoned troops already knew, but living it had turned out to be a very different proposition, and I believe I remember being told that there'd been more than a few of them who'd returned to the US not to burn bras or flags, but their firearm owner's ID cards - these boys would never again touch a firearm for any reason.

NONE of the people I'd talked to talked about the "glory" of killing. Most of them simply shrugged when asked about it, saying "You do what you gotta do, because if you don't, you die". In this sense, I suppose it's possible to turn normal people into bloodthirsty vampires, but I think there's more to it.

A person confronted with the kill/no kill decision with nobody else around is a completely free agent; he may choose or decline to choose to kill, knowing his own life may be forfeit if he chooses "moral cowardice" in declining to discharge his duty to Mom and Apple Pie. When he's with his unit, though, the situation becomes a bit more complex: the decision not to kill may cost the life of one of his team-mates.

Yes, you do hear stories of people resorting to cannibalism in times of famine, but the little bit of browsing around I've done in this area suggests that such stories can be very difficult to confirm or dismiss.

One story that I found particularly disturbing involved a man in early New England slaughtering his wife, consuming her in chunks over the course of a particularly hard winter. This is the only such story I can remember ever having run across that involved a solitary act of deliberate cannibalism that isn't caused by Dahmler-like illness. All other such stories have involved groups of people, the two coming most immediately to mind are the Andean plane crash and the Donner party.

The group dynamic comes into play here. Any of these individuals might have chosen to starve to death before resorting to cannibalism, but with a group of people steadfastly intent on keeping each other alive, it's not hard to imagine the necessity being successfully argued, and possibly even enforced. There's a community around to tell the individual "yes, this is wrong, but dying is more wrong"; a group dynamic supercedes the individual's repulsed conscience.

If I'm remembering properly, survivors of the Andean plane crash had made a pact among themselves never to tell anybody. The pact wasn't honoured for very long; the survivors had a lot of trouble living with their guilt.

Edit: 29 Octobre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

Edit: 5 Novembre 2011, replaced a "bad word" with [deleted] to comply with renewed restrictions on language.

[Lacenaire]

As it happens, to my own view of the film, all this is rather irrelevant. My own view is that all “moral issues” in art or literature or anywhere else must reflect some moral issues in the real word. They can do it either literally or metaphorically but the problem itself has to be a real world problem. A writer of a fantasy can give the creatures he creates any qualities he chooses but by doing so he cannot create a new kind of moral problem. The moral dilemmas of vampirism do not exist - the maybe perhaps only a metaphor or allegory for some others that do exist. So the way I see the film: all moral issues in it involve Oskar’s decisions and Oskar actions. He is the only “moral agent” and the only possessor of free will.

I take it from this post, and from previous ones as well, that you exercise your mental effort to analyze films with a certain economy, such that if a character in a film is so fantastic as to no longer serve as a useful metaphor for real-life moral issues, it is not worth the effort. I agree with you; I am just not quite so conservative with regard to which characters should be included or excluded from the analysis. For example, I agree that it is worth looking at Oskar's decisions from a moral perspective, even though some of those decisions are based upon an emotional attachment to a fantastic being. But I would not exclude Eli herself from analysis, because I believe there is enough to think about with regard to her, albeit make-believe condition, to make it an interesting and potentially thought-provoking basis for discussion. And part of that discussion has been, from time to time, whether Eli is really fully human or not, to the extent she is driven to do certain things by virtue of her self-described "disease."

I agree with most or, perhaps, even all of the above. Certainly Eli and various situations she and Oskar find themselves in can serve as "metaphors" for many real life situations and problems. However, the extent to which they do so is a matter of "aesthetics" rather than "ethics". In other words, the appropriate questions to ask are whether the film is "true to life" and not, for example, whether Eli “should be killed” or not, is evil or not etc. I certainly am not claiming that fantastic films or novels cannot be true to life - far from it, some of the ones that I think are "deepest" and most "true to life” (like the Seventh Seal, for example) are of this kind.

However, there are two “aspects” which appear in many of the discussions here that I find not to my “taste”. They are

(1) excessively literal treatment of the character of Eli, which includes all kind of issues not directly related to her relationship with Oskar
(2) attempting to draw any general conclusions about morality, rights of beings other than humans etc, from a story and a film about an imaginary creature.

The first point is, in my opinion, something that is already done in the novel. I think I remember JAL explaining somewhere that he wanted to show “what it would be like to be a vampire” and “that it would be horrible”. Now, this is not the kind of thing that interests me, for two reasons. One is that, unlike Lina, I have never “wanted to be a vampire” (or even thought of that) and have need to be convinced that it would not be pleasant. More seriously, since the author can freely create any vampire he likes, including one whose life is horrible and one who spends all his time enjoying himself, I see nothing that can possible be of any other value in this than providing a little unserious entertainment (I am certainly not against unserious entertainment but I don’t think it should be taken too seriously).

Of course one can always ask whether an author’s portrayal of a vampire is convincing or not - e.g. is Eli a more “convincing” vampire than Dracula or Nosferatu, or the vampires in Twilight? However, the answers to such questions are basically matters of aesthetic taste and have nothing to do morality or other serious issues.

The question of “what it must feel like to be a vampire” is, for me, no more interesting than what it would feel like to be Bergman’s “personified Death”. There are actually quite many remarkable similarities there are between the Death character and Eli. Both are, more or less eternal and spend their time killing people and on pure intellectual, “mathematical”, pursuits such as chess and puzzles. Both have have very similar demeanor : calm, quiet, reserved, with a seeming deep insight into human psychology. If you wish, you can try to imagine how tragic is must be to be this kind of character. I would say, it’s probably worse to be Death than to be Eli - after all, he does far more killing than Eli and yet he is also “unknowing” - as he tells Block. In fact, when I watched this film for the first time I almost cried at the point when Death tells Block, who is expecting that now that he had lost the game of chess and his life, he will be revealed the final truth (about God), that he is “unknowing” - but of course I almost cried for Block (with whom I tend to identify) and not for Death, and in exactly the same way I have never felt like crying for Eli. To me she is only relevant emotionally in relation to Oskar and not by herself.

Of course I am not saying that I think my way of looking at this is “objectively correct” or superior to those who like to feel sorry for Eli (although sometimes this takes an almost comical form - I mean in particular one case when an ex-member of this forum became extremely personally upset with another one who, he believed, had suggested that it would be right to kill Eli), but only that view of things is quite alien to me.

Now that I got to this point, perhaps I will briefly answer the question why, I think, the film impressed me so much while the book did not. I was planning to write about this in another thread but now that I got this far I might as well do it here.

Of course one, and perhaps the main, reason is the beauty of the film - I have written a lot about that. But another reason, I think, is related to the aesthetic concept known as “expressionism”. In art “expressionism” is identified most strongly with painters such as Edward Munch, in whose work the “objective” and “subjective” are merged into one creating dream like (often nightmare like) atmosphere. In film expressionism of “German expressionism” is used in connection with certain visual aspects of certain films, particularly the use of distortion to create an atmosphere and emotional impact. This was once popular in horror films, perhaps the most classic example of this sort of expressionism is “Nosferatu”.

The Seventh Seal is also often considered as an example of expressionism. Very strong and “unnatural” contrasts are used to create a nightmarish atmosphere, and then, of course, there is the allegorical character of personified Death. This Death walks, talks, plays chess and appears in various places and various disguises. He is not a dream of Block or an of the “realistic” characters for he appears when they are not present and is seen by several. Yet we obviously can’t conceive of him as being fully real (although Death is certainly real, personified Death is a different matter. Perhaps we should remember, however, that this was not always so - in the Middle Ages a person would have found it much easier to believe in personified Death than we in a vampire).

Now, as far as the purely visual side, I don’t think LTROI is very “expressionist” (at least when compared to “Nosferatu”). If you include the sound and audio effects, it becomes much more so. But I do find the character of Eli and the whole atmosphere of the film become the most satisfying for me in the “expressionist” context. That means that, like Death in Berman’s film, I don’t see Eli as a fully “real” character. I don’t see her also as Oskar’s dream - but the whole thing is to me, indeed, a kind of dream.

This is particularly and notably true of the ending, which to me has a similar atmosphere to the ending of “The Seventh Seal”. In the latter, Death leads Block and his companions into the unknown. Before they are lead away, each expresses his belief about what will follow: Block remains a believer, his squire Jöns - a firm atheist. What follows after that we do not know and will never find out, at least until we depart on this sort of journey ourselves.

This is also how I see the ending of LTROI and I think this is probably how TA intended it to be seen. JAL obviously had a different idea and that is why there is The Epilogue. From my point of view obviously it does not add anything worh adding.

I would have to add two other points, somewhat related, that have come home to me as a consequence of my participation in this forum for two years now, as a direct result of discussions about Eli's "morality." First, there are apparently more people out there who at least are prepared to believe, seemingly with little or no remorse, that they would repeatedly destroy the lives of "strangers" to sustain their own existence than I would have imagined. This has been somewhat of an eye-opener for me, and I am still unsure what to make of it. Second, there appear to be surprisingly few people who believe that man has the capacity to know or experience the Divine, or even believe that anything divine exists. On a personal level, I find this equally troubling.

I completely agree with you on both points. Moreover, to me they are obviously closely related. I did not mean to enter into this discussion about the relationship between morality and religion (loosely speaking) but now that you have brought up these points there is no escape.

What has been written on this topic in this thread, in my opinion, totally misses the most important point. The fact that human beings have some sort of “moral instinct” or “morality forming” instinct and that it is prior to any religion they may acquire seems obvious to me and, contrary to the assertions in this thread, not denied by any serious religious thinkers. The issue is not if atheists can be moral human beings, which they obviously can, but precisely how this morality of theirs stands up in the face of Death.
The issue is not only if an individual atheist can find in himself enough moral strength to give up his life for anything else (in fact, they obviously can, particularly if they are communist or Nazi fanatics thousands of who gave their lives for their respective purely atheistic causes) but whether he can produce any argument that would be accepted by other atheists as a valid reason for doing that.

For a person who believes in God and after-life the situation is relatively simple. Death is not the end of things and hence his own life not the most valuable thing on earth. I think his is obvious and needs no further argument.

What about an atheist? If he is honest, he will admit that this is a very difficult problem, to say the least. Na Kriege, and early member of this forum, was very honest about it: he admitted that to him his own life was everything there was - its end was the end of everything. If this is so, however, doesn’t Eli’s behaviour become entirely justified and should not every reasonable person (or reasonable atheist) be expected to behave analogously?

It seems to me that this is exactly what lies behind your second point. I would call it inordinate fear of Death - which I think is indeed a part of the psyche of most (though not all) atheists. Some who have accepted this have even argued that it is a good thing - it discourages certain actions that have become very much associated with a certain religion in recent times. I see it is overall, as a very bad thing -the curse of our times and of secular societies. Of all “tasks” in a human life, I find learning to accept Death, not to fear it and even eventually to welcome it, as the most important one. We should also live as if our own individual life was not the end of all things.

This is what “The Seventh Seal” is essentially about. As Death says “men do not think of Death” except “on that day”.
A sense of the Divine thanks to think about Death. Atheism does not.

Of course, I may be wrong. If someone could produce a convincing argument from the atheist perspective why one should not view Death as the end of all things and fear it, I would be overjoyed to read it.

[a_contemplative_life]

Since this thread has occasionally drifted into a discussion about our genetically programmed behaviors, I thought this might be of interest... 'confirmation bias' helps us argue, even if we're wrong.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... we-reason/

[covenant6452]

I have to ask as it has been many, many years since I have seen "Seventh Seal". Does Death actually DO the killing, or is he just there to collect the souls of the dead after death?
If it is the latter, I don't think he can be compared to Eli, if the former...never mind, carry on.

[Lacenaire]

I have to ask as it has been many, many years since I have seen "Seventh Seal". Does Death actually DO the killing, or is he just there to collect the souls of the dead after death?
If it is the latter, I don't think he can be compared to Eli, if the former...never mind, carry on.

Like everything else in the film, this is ambiguous. Most people seem to be killed by other people or disease. Death does cut the tree on which the actor Skat is hiding, thus killing him (we assume). He also can postpone death (as he does for Block) although he says “I give no respite”.
The film does not make clear if souls exist or not. You are left to make your own choice.

[sauvin]

Since this thread has occasionally drifted into a discussion about our genetically programmed behaviors, I thought this might be of interest... 'confirmation bias' helps us argue, even if we're wrong.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/ ... we-reason/

Needless to say, this new theory paints a rather bleak portrait of human nature. We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, blessed with this Promethean gift of being able to decipher the world and uncover all sorts of hidden truths. But Mercier and Sperber argue that reason has little to do with reality, which is why I’m still convinced that those NBA players are streaky when they’re really just lucky. Instead, the function of reasoning is rooted in communication, in the act of trying to persuade other people that what we believe is true. We are social animals all the way down.

I wonder how much of this confirmation bias might vary by individual. If this article has any merit, it doesn't say much about our ability to solve problems or analyse things meaningfully.