“Workmen dig, workmen hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by the fountain, there is raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the water.” (p 177)
This passage, from the chapter 'Knitting', shows that the fountain, where the condemned man is being hanged before the town, represents the life of the village. The water in the fountain brings life and is necessary to the citizens of the village. The soldiers in the village act above the ordinary citizens, for they rely on the workmen and common people to do all the work preparing the gallows. The gallows, which is a symbol of death and oppression, casts a vibe of gloom over the whole town. The way the soldiers are portrayed to the workmen and presence of the gallows are both equally “poisoning the water” of the fountain. This water, being the life of the villagers, is being made sicker and more related to death, and is making the people themselves poisoned. This also shows that the gallows themselves represent poison that can contaminate all around it (with blood and death), and that as the citizens become more poisoned and desensitized to the death around them, they will poison the land around them with their own thirst for blood.
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But, on page 183, the following chapter, it talks about the water in the village well, and that it's pure...
"Château and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the stone floor and the pure water in the village well - thousands of acres of land - a whole province of France - all France itself - lay under the night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line.
As weird as it is, I think I might have to argue that death cleanses these people. You said that with the more blood and death that the more poisoned they become, but theres blood and death right here, and yet the water is said to be pure. The passage you picked is of the men preparing for a death, and maybe the preparation is the poisoning part. Then the actual death of a person snaps them back to reality, purifying them again.
A Freudian reading can be taken on this, and then I think I'd have to agree with you. The well representing the id (underground), being pure, and the fountain representing the super-ego since it is above land; the super-ego could be getting poisoned with death/blood, annnnnd that would be really bad.
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