If you look at Belcher in Frank O"Connor's "Guests of the Nation" and the Chinese soldier in Haruki Murakami's "Another Way to Die", there reactions to the knowledge that they are about are in fact similar. In "Guests of the Nation" Belcher is quite patient while waiting for his turn to be executed. Surprisingly striking up a conversation as Frank O"Connor illustrates, "It was an extraordinary thing, but in those few minutes Belcher said more than in all the weeks before. It was as if the sound of the shot had started a flood of talk in him" (2). Noticing that both Bonaparte and Donovan had forgotten to blindfold Hawkins, he calmly attempts to blindfold himself. Doing so suggests that he was preparing for his turn while getting a last laugh pointing out Bonaparte and Donovan's bonehead mistake. Then with one shot, from an already agitated Donovan's pistol, he dies instantly. Down to the very end, he had nothing bad to say to his executioners. I think this was a man at peace with his death. Now in Haruki Murakami's "Another Way to Die" you get a whole other scenario of military executions. The Chinese soldier, after he was beaten bloody, helped dig a large whole for his already dead comrades, and forced to watch as his live comrades are bayoneted is ordered to kneel at the edge of the whole. While on his knees he watched, with no resistance and without a word, while the lieutenant showed the young Japanese soldier how to swing the bat to kill him. The Chinese soldier not saying or doing anything while the young .
2.
Japanese soldier practiced his swing indicated to me that he had pretty much accepted that he was going to die. I thought he would have been restrained or something to keep him from retaliating. No, the young soldier got in his stance, snapped his hips, and "crack" a home run. The first strike didn't kill him, and its my opinion that even though he did, as the narrator suggests, "rose up into a sitting position as if he had just come fully awake"(1), it was just to add that last gasp at the end of the story.
