- Lying on his back with nothing to do but think, Joe wonders about the reasons he didn't question anything when he was called to serve. Here's his logic:
- First, he thinks about the idea of dying for liberty. He thinks about what a vague term "liberty" is. Liberty, he thinks, is just a word, and not a concrete thing. It's foolish to fight for something that isn't even concrete. Joe claims that if someone ever spoke to him about fighting for liberty, he would assert that his life was more important than an idea.
- Next, Joe thinks about the American Revolution in 1776, and he wonders whether freedom can only be achieved through fighting. He thinks of places like Canada and Australia, where they didn't need to fight in order to be democratic.
- Joe thinks about how other words that are used to incite people to war—words like "independence" or "democracy" or "native land"—don't actually refer to anything concrete.
- Joe keeps talking about the "little guys" who get suckered into fighting for these things that aren't really real. He thinks about what the good is in preserving your native land if you might die in the process.
- Then Joe thinks about how some people get other people to fight by saying that they're protecting women. Joe sees this as little more than a bargain, because, he reasons, when you're not fighting for one particular woman, you're fighting for all of them, "And by that time you're fighting for a word again" (10.11).
- Joe next thinks about people who argue that there are things worth dying for. He argues that no principle is dearer than life. People sure are willing to sacrifice life when it's someone else's life getting sacrificed.
- The dead, Joe thinks, can't speak. They can't say that they're happy about what they died for. So people who try to make these concepts legit by invoking the dead have no right to speak for the dead. None of it makes sense, thinks Joe. "Why then should I be willing to die for the privilege of living?" (10.18).
- Joe finishes by thinking of what all the men who died in the war were thinking at their last moments, and he concludes that it wasn't the liberty they were fighting for in the first place: it was the desire to keep living.
- Finally, Joe considers himself the nearest thing to a living dead man on earth, someone who can speak for the dead because the dead can't do it themselves. "There's nothing noble about dying," Joe thinks (10.26); death is final, and that's about it.