The Wall

Life guarding the Wall is dangerous, but it is also monotonous. At the Wall, there “isn’t much narrative. You do have the constant prospect of action, the constant risk of sudden and total disaster—but that’s not the same as stuff actually happening” (14). Joseph plays with language to quantify the Wall. He talks about its measurements—“10,000 kilometers long” by “three meters wide at the top” by “five meters” high (14). He uses poetry and prose to describe its elements of sea, concrete, sky, and cold.

Being a Defender is mostly about being prepared for something that never happens. Kavanagh and his coworkers wake up each day, eat their rations, dress, prepare their weapons, and then go to their posts. In other places, the shifts are in two six-hour increments, but their Captain is no-nonsense; he requires them to work 12 hours straight or to be on rest. The work is bleak, but at least there are other Defenders grumbling alongside you as they defend the Wall.

Joseph narrates his first full day on the Wall and describes his captain. It is hard to get through the minutes and hours, so Joseph distracts himself by looking at the energy bar for his midmorning snack. He gets excited when Mary, the person who brings around the snacks, comes by. Mary chats and sits with some Defenders, but tells Joseph there isn’t time for that. He feels left out and lonely as a result.

The Captain comes by and rebukes Joseph for spending too much time examining his bar and not enough time watching for the Others.

The Captain is an intimidating man, especially once Joseph learns he has spent four tours—one mandatory and the other three voluntary—on the Wall. Volunteer tours come with perks and privileges for the families of the Defender. It brings Defenders close to the status of the elite, people who are only visible to Joseph as those with enough pull to travel by air on the planes that go back and forth over the Wall. Energy is mostly nuclear, making flight a rarity. Joseph both envies and dislikes the elites, but he admires the Captain. The Captain is a “brave man, a family man, a leader, an athlete. A person with a sense of duty and responsibility. A good man to follow into battle” (28). Thinking back on it, Joseph reflects, it is hard to imagine what a liar the Captain really was.

Joseph gets closer to other members of his company. Half of his company is female, but the bulky clothes worn by the Defenders make it hard to figure that out. He learns that Hifa, a fellow Defender, is a woman by peeking at her one night in the barracks. As he settles into the routine, Joseph realizes that two of his peers regularly have sex. There is no privacy, and Joseph wonders where the two are intimate. He assumes the pair are Breeders, the name for people who have children and receive additional privileges as a result. The Wall needs people to defend it, so there will always be Breeders.

Everyone knows that since the Change, most of the people in the world who live outside of the United Kingdom “are starving and drowning […] so how dare we make more of them?” (33). Joseph speculates that people breed because they believe God gives them the responsibility to keep reproducing, or maybe they are just thoughtlessly doing what they’ve always done. As it is, maintaining the barrier between the United Kingdom and the rest of the world also requires an air force (the Flight) and a coast guard (the Guard). Failing to stop others in those forces doesn’t result in being put out to sea. Defenders only have to come face to face with Others and kill them. The Flight and Guard are also fewer in number, making them more selective.

Two more weeks pass, and Joseph finds that the sheer boredom of his work makes him careless. Sarge loudly reprimands him for not storing his extra ammunition properly, and tells him the Captain is so strict that this kind of behavior is not tolerated. The Captain hands out extra time on the Wall when Defenders are lax.

Sarge shares an open secret: The Captain used to be an Other. He came to the country 10 years ago. Back then, Others who made it past the Wall with needed skills could stay, and the Defender who failed to keep them out would be exiled to live outside the Wall. That time is past. These days, Others who go over the Wall are caught almost immediately because everyone inside the Wall is chipped and thus subject to surveillance.

Others who get caught “have to choose between being euthanized, becoming Help, or being put back to sea” (45). Help is a lifelong sentence of unpaid labor under the direction of the elites and the state. The children of Help can become citizens, but the state takes these children away from Help to be raised by citizens. The state even uses Help as Breeders.

Joseph’s new knowledge about the Captain makes him re-assess his attitude toward his work. He means to adhere strictly to the rules just like the Captain. There are no margins for “small human errors, only black and white, the rulebook or anarchy, nothing but the Wall and the Others and the always waiting, always expectant, entirely unforgiving sea” (46).

Joseph goes home for leave after serving his first two weeks. He feels camaraderie as he drinks with his fellow Defenders on the transport home. They are rowdy, and the civilians in their transport give them a wide berth. He finally meets the other shift in his company, including Hughes, a slight man whose face he has never seen. Despite being in the same company, people in different shifts don’t know each other and never see each other’s faces because of what it takes to survive the cold.

On the way home, the Defenders sing a song with just one line—"We’re on the Wall because” that captures the senselessness of life on the Wall (51). As they all sing, Kavanagh finds the song to be “hypnotic, self-transcending; you never felt less of an individual, more of a group, than when you were singing that song, chanting that chant, dirging that dirge” (51).

The closer they get to home, the more ambivalent Joseph feels about going home. Hifa’s company part of the way lessens that feeling. Home is a foreign idea once you’ve served on the Wall. When you serve, you “stop believing in the idea that anybody, ever, has no choice but to take you in. Nobody has to take you in. They can choose to, or not” (52).