How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He knew, for instance, what brains looked like spilling out of somebody's head. (4.19)
Because he fought in World War II, Ishmael has some experiences with death that go far beyond the typical person's. This quote is only one of several grisly memories we get throughout the story.
Quote #2
In America, she said, there was fear of death; here life was separate from Being. A Japanese, on the other hand, must see that life embraces death, and when she feels the truth of this she will gain tranquility. (7.36)
These are some life lessons that Mrs. Shigemura taught Hatsue regarding the differences between Americans and the Japanese. In her view, the Japanese have a healthier attitude toward death than Americans, since they view death as continuous with life (not a separate entity).
Quote #3
He knew himself privately to be guilty of murder, to have murdered men in the course of war, and it was this guilt—he knew no other word—that lived in him perpetually and that he exerted himself not to communicate. (11.6)
Though wartime killing is traditionally viewed as different from murder, Kabuo views himself as a murderer because of the killing he did during the war.
Quote #4
The death penalty, Kabuo said to himself. He was a Buddhist and believed in the laws of karma, so it made sense to him that he might pay for his war murders: everything comes back to you, nothing is accidental. The fear of death grew in him. He thought of Hatsue and of his children, and it seemed to him he must be exiled from them—because he felt for them so much love—in order to pay his debts to the dead he had left on the ground in Italy. (11.19)
Kabuo perceives the fact that he's on trial—and might receive the death penalty—as fitting karmic retribution for the fact that he killed people in World War II.
Quote #5
Private Willis had been killed two days later on patrol, by friendly mortar fire he'd called for at the direction of Lieutenant Kent himself, who'd given the correct coordinates. Seven men in the platoon had died on that occasion. (16.2).
Private Willis had used the private parts of a dead Japanese boy for target practice... and then was shot by accident in friendly fire two days later. Ishmael's memories of war are a mish mash of grotesque accidents and atrocities such as these.
Quote #6
Hinkle went down over the starboard gunnel and dropped down into the water. Men began to follow him, including Ishmael Chambers, who was maneuvering his eighty-five-pound pack over the side when Hinkle was shot in the face and went down, and then the man just behind him was shot, too, and the top of his head came off. (16.33)
Here we get some details about Ishmael's participation in the Battle of Tarawa. Ishmael remembers that the Japanese presence was so strong that soldiers were being struck down in droves before they could even get up the beach.
Quote #7
Ishmael saw Eric Bledsoe bleed to death. Fifty yards away he lay in the surf pleading in a soft voice for help. (16.35)
Although Ishmael and some other soldiers were close enough to go get Bledsoe, they were forbidden from doing so, since they would likely get shot. So, they had to sit there under cover, watching him bleed out—brutal stuff.
Quote #8
He did not want to explain to her his coldness or reveal himself. He had watched her, after all, mourn her husband's death and it had been for her in part the discovery that grief could attach itself with permanence—something Ishmael had already discovered. It attached itself and then it borrowed inside and made a nest and stayed. It ate whatever was warm nearby, and then the coldness settled in permanently. You learned to live with it. (24.42)
Ishmael is contrasting his mother's experience of death and grief (as she experienced it with her husband's passing) with his own feelings of grief, which are likely (in large part, if not entirely) related to losing Hatsue, as opposed to his brushes with death in the war.
Quote #9
"I'm dead in the water." (27.46)
Carl says this when Kabuo finds him floating out in the fog with a dead battery. Obviously, it's a sad bit of foreshadowing, since Carl himself is dead in the water not long after this point.
Quote #10
It must have been that in the ghost fog that night he never saw the wall of water the Corona threw at him. The sea rose up from behind the fog and welled underneath the Susan Marie so that the coffee cup on the cabin table fell to the floor, and the angle of deflection high up the mast was enough to jar loose the astonished man who hung there not grasping the nature of what was happening, and still he did not foresee his death. (32.77)
This is Ishmael imagining the moment of Carl's death as he gets ready to write the story of the whole affair down.