In Gods Go Begging, what happens when the trauma of the characters' lives becomes normal? Also make sure to quote the text and closely analyze...

Repeated trauma in the characters' lives in Gods Go Beggingmakes them hardened and incapable of experiencing real joy or human connection. For example, the chief medical examiner in the coroner's office is so used to death that it "had become so completely empirical to him, so damned quantifiable" (5). He detests thinking about the people whose bodies he is examining, and only looks at the corpses in cold, clinical terms. He is aware that...

Repeated trauma in the characters' lives in Gods Go Begging makes them hardened and incapable of experiencing real joy or human connection. For example, the chief medical examiner in the coroner's office is so used to death that it "had become so completely empirical to him, so damned quantifiable" (5). He detests thinking about the people whose bodies he is examining, and only looks at the corpses in cold, clinical terms. He is aware that his job is slowly robbing him of any sense of joy and curiosity and thinks, "this career would stalk him; it would take careful aim at his native curiosity, his romanticism, his passion" (27). In this passage, his career is personified, and it takes on the qualities of a gunman who can kill the medical examiner's sense of enjoyment and wonder.

War also causes a kind of trauma that makes people distanced from others. The medical examiner served in Vietnam, and he grew to relish being isolated from others. Véa writes, "As Captain of the graves detail in DaNang, he had gone for whole months at a time without speaking with a subordinate" (26). The medical examiner longs for this type of removal from human society, as regular trauma has made him want to distance himself from others. 

Other characters in the book react to repeated trauma with a kind of dark humor. For example, the defense lawyers, having seen violence and injustice, practice "icy gallows humor, foxhole laughter soaked with dolor and with the great relief that remains when days and hours of mental trauma are now only harmless memories, though very painful ones" (28). In this passage, laughter becomes an object that is soaked with sadness. The laughter only brings a grim kind of relief rather than real joy. The trauma the defense lawyers have seen has become so normal to them that they can only laugh at it in a dark way. Their humor doesn't really bring gladness, though; it only brings momentary relief.