How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #7
It was not bad to be an old man, drifting. Soon to see the Light. He wondered what it would be like to enter the Presence. They said there would be a fierce blinding light. How could they know, any of them? He wondered: Do you see all the old friends? At what age will they be? Will I see my father? (3.6.82)
These are more of Lee's religious reflections on death. He's suffering from heart trouble, which gives him even greater reason to consider his mortality. How do these many reflections on death affect your experience of the novel? Do they make individual characters' death seem more real to you?
Quote #8
And there on the rock, sitting staring down at the long line of dark men shapeless under dark trees, he felt for the first time the sense of the coming end. They were dwindling away like sands in a glass. How long does it go on? Each one becoming more precious. What's left now is the best, each man a rock. But now there are so few. We began with a thousand and so whittled down, polishing, pruning, until what we had yesterday was superb, absolutely superb, and now only about two hundred, and, God, had it not been for those boys from the Second Maine… But the end is in sight. Another day like yesterday… and the Regiment will be gone. In the Union Army that was the way it was: they fought a unit until it bled to death. There were no replacements. (4.1.60)
Chamberlain confronts the brutal reality of war: even though his regiment has seen such intense combat, they're not going to get much of a break. The war might even annihilate them entirely. (Fortunately, this didn't happen—Chamberlain lived to become a Brigadier General and receive the Confederate surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.)
Quote #9
Sometimes he believed in a Heaven, mostly he believed in a Heaven; there ought to be a Heaven for young soldiers, especially young soldiers, but just as surely for the old soldier; there out to be more than just that metallic end, and then silence, then the worms, and sometimes he believed, mostly he believed, but just this moment he did not believe at all, knew Kilrain was dead and gone forever, that the grin had died and would not reappear, never, there was nothing beyond the sound of the guns but the vast dark, the huge nothing, not even silence, just an end… (4.3.51)
In thinking about Kilrain's death, Chamberlain momentarily sees things the way Kilrain would see them: no afterlife and no divine spark. If Kilrain is right, though, does this make war more horrible? Or is death frightening no matter how you look at it?