Foil

Character Role Analysis

Bill Harper, the Limey Subaltern, Lazarus

Joe and Bill are besties, which is already a sign that they may be each others' foils. Bill does some pretty foil-ish things, like stealing Joe's girlfriend and shoving himself straight in the middle of Joe's relationship with his father by losing the fishing rod. But the foil relationship really gets interesting when we learn that Bill dies in the war, and Joe considers him to be the better off of the two of them.

Joe considers himself the opposite of the Limey subaltern since one has been destroyed bodily and the other mentally. They represent two kinds of ways that war leaves people scarred: one is a healthy mind inside a dysfunctional body; the other is a dysfunctional mind inside a healthy body.

Joe doesn't have an immediate relationship with Lazarus the dead German soldier, but he does come to see himself as a kind of Lazarus later on (just as he also comes to see himself as a kind of Christ). Whereas the dead soldier cannot be "resurrected" except in the sense that his body keeps getting blown out of its grave, Joe seems to have the possibility of being rescued from his deathly isolation—but this possibility is destroyed.