'Fire Burns and Does Its Duty" Jules Image Study

"Fire burns and does its duty" - Vinoba Bhave

The irony of Jules' attraction with this quote, is that Jules often uses it in reference with violence, and the man who said it originally was an advocate or nonviolence. To me, Jules frequent references and scenes including fire mean the creation of something new. Fire burns away the old, and in comes the new to take its place. It does its duty...

"The fire began to spread in several directions now, still skirting him as if aware of his power, but at the edge of his vision it was leaping and taking on an energy the match's thin flame never hinted at"

We get our first sense of unpredictability in Jules when he sets one of the barns on his family's farm on fire. At this point, Jules is about 10 or so years old. He is trying to prove to his little sister, Maureen Wendall, that he can control fire, and after pretending to do so he accidentally set the barn on fire. The weird part of this though, is that directly after sensing that something had gone wrong, he stays put and watches the fire come to life. This lack of self-preservation is a big quality of his...

"So this was what those photographs of burning planes were about..."

When Jules sees a crashed plane, it changes him. He became more aware of the world he was living in, more aware of the fact that he COULD die at any moment in time. He could see a dead person with his head chopped off, and knew that the fumes from the plane could poison him. After seeing him by himself in a barn, talking to himself, Loretta ponders that "He might have been someone else's child, a stranger's child".

"He thought suddenly of the flash of electricity that would kill him: he'd seen preparations for many electrocutions in the movies and comic books... the electric chair, with its clumsy, homely similarity to ordinary chairs, fascinated him"

Jules was a bit like this. You could think he was normal, would see him walk and talk like a regular human being, but you could never know what was going on his mind. He killed a man once, just because he could. He was lethal, different and had a purpose. He had a weird obsession with fire and death, it "fascinated" him, made him think long, rambling paragraphs about it...

"He was only himself, free. But it was possible that he had a devil in him; a devil was to his imagination a kind of persistent failing, a dragging over to one side, as when a car's tire's begin to go on one side and drag everything over that way, relentlessly. If he had a devil, the devil's name was Jules also."

Jules has a weird way of imagining things. The way his brain works is abnormally different than any other human being. He wonders about things, and questions their reality. Jule's characterization of the devil within him is different. It wasn't completely negative, more a different take on what the devil, and thereby evil, really mean. This wonderment is seen throughout and is a prime personality trait within him.

Disclaimer: photos belong to www.travelpod.com/.../1170666120/tpod.html, http://www.thejakartapost.com/files/images/1hercules2.jpg, http://www.gangsorus.com/images/electric%20chair.png, and http://www.redicecreations.com/specialreports/2006/01jan/devil.jpg respectively

This is the Image Study meant to be graded...