Mara Scribner
6/30/10
The Sunflower

“What would I have done,” is the question that Simon from The Sunflower asks us to consider for ourselves. It’s a very difficult question to ask, considering, none of us in this literature class have been through a genocide and I’m sure that none of us have experienced anything as heartbreaking as one. When I am hurt by someone or someone does something wrong to me I become very angry and I am also easily made upset. Therefore, I believe that if I were in Simon’s position I would have made the dying SS soldier feel even worse about his situation and his guilt and then left him to die without any sense of peace. I am not a very forgiving person, and to think of what he did to all those people in the burning house makes me sick to my stomach. He might feel sorry now, but it seems that he realized this a little too late.
I find it strange that Simon was so worried about his meeting with the dying SS soldier. If I was in his position I would feel numb to the situation considering all of the other tortures I was being put through at the time. Even though I would have acted differently in that hospital room, I still believe that Simon’s reaction to the SS man was okay and that he had to reason to regret or feel sorry for the way he had acted. He merely ignored the SS man and denied him the mercy of showing any forgiveness. I feel that this is a more merciful way of not allowing the man to die in peace compared to the way I would do it, by attempting to make him feel even worse about what he has done. In the story, every time Simon would ask for their opinions on how he treated the SS man and if it was the right thing to do I just asked myself, “Why?” I didn’t understand why he was so bothered by it. He is obviously still somewhat bothered by it if he had to write a novel to ask for more people’s opinions on the matter. If I ever got a chance to say anything to him or exchange words with him I would let him know that, in my eyes, how he reacted to the SS man was alright and quite merciful. I do not believe the SS man deserved anything more than what he got.