How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
[...] I've already decided that I like the liberty I've got right here the liberty to walk and see and hear and talk and eat and sleep with my girl. I think I like that liberty a lot better than fighting for a lot of things we won't get and ending up without any liberty at all. (10.4)
While Joe says earlier that you can't to point to something like liberty, he actually seems to be trying to define it here. Ironically, his version of liberty seems almost to cancel out the option of going to fight for it.
Quote #5
Please all you guys who want to fight to preserve our honor let us know what the hell honor is. (10.7)
No, it's not that Joe literally doesn't know what honor is; he's asking what about honor makes it necessary to go out and fight in order to preserve it. Who decided that fighting is honorable and not fighting is dishonorable?
Quote #6
For Christ sake give us things to fight for we can see and feel and pin down and understand. No more highfalutin words that mean nothing like native land. Motherland fatherland homeland native land. It's all the same. (10.9)
You might think that the idea of a native land would be something you could point to or pin down in the literal sense, but here it seems that it's just as much as slippery term as any other. It's also interesting that Joe says that "native land" is a "highfalutin" word, which means that it's overblown and pretentious. But this is where it gets tricky: is there a difference between the idea of your native land, and your literal native land? In other words, maybe Joe's idea is that your real native land is just the specific place—like a town, or a house—where you feel at home, whereas "native land" as a political idea is just another empty word that people use to manipulate each other.