‘The Ends’ by Peter Ho Davies

The Ends by Peter Ho Davies, 2002

The magic trick:

Using sympathy as a means to further mockery

Peter Ho Davies in “The Ends” takes a terrible topic – the Holocaust – and humanizes the Nazis. That seems like a dicey proposition, right? Do these agents of evil deserve such treatment?

Read on, though, and you will see that this humanization is in fact opening them up to mockery. This story paints them as pathetic in their final days, doing any number of demeaning, disgusting things to try to save themselves. Yes, the story makes them more human. But it’s not sympathy the reader finds; it’s further disgust.

And that’s quite a trick on Davies’s part.

The selection:

At first the Gls played early in the evening and then later and later into the night, even after lights out. They were mad for the game, obsessed, it seemed to me. It was as if they had so much energy—guarding us was tedious, I supposed—that they had to expend it in marathon matches. I found myself dreaming of the game, as I imagined it, the men impossibly small, beneath the high basket that hung suspended over them, the rope net swaying, the ball sailing up, missing, falling from a great height.

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