Faithful Elephants Response

      In “Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War” by Yukio Tsuchia, the author tells a framed story, a story of a story from years ago that was told to him by a zookeeper one day. The story is about three elephants named John, Tonky and Wanly, that were once at the zoo where the author is told the story , that were ordered to be killed by the Japanese Army during World War II, this is the setting of the story and it’s what influences the outcome of the story. The story stretches along the weeks of their slow deaths. They are starved to death. Again and again they innocently beg for food but nobody is allowed to do anything, it’s no longer in their hands. Weeks later the elephants died. They were innocent and had done nothing to deserve what they had got. Their zookeepers wanted so badly to do something for them but in the end they didn’t. When the elephants die their innocence doesn’t just disappear, it sticks with the zookeepers and later turns into guilt.

The elephants’ innocence plays a huge role over the course of the story. The author describes them in a heartbreaking matter. For instance, “As the days passed, the elephants became thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker,” the way that they’re being described in this specific excerpt makes you feel with the elephants, it has the effect of making you picture them being starved and stuck in their cages. This is another symbol that I noticed that the author uses throughout the story to send the same message. A cage symbolizes being locked in, weak, vulnerable and without freedom, all of these adjectives could be used to describe the elephants. The elephants can’t control whether they eat or not. That’s up to the zookeepers. But the author doesn’t let go of the idea of their innocence too quickly. He uses personification as well as metaphors to stretch the idea, “Whenever a keeper walked by their cage, they would stand up, tottering, as if to beg, ‘Give us something to eat. Please give us water!’ Their small loving eyes began to look like rubber balls in their drooping, shrunken faces.” This effects the actions taken by the zookeepers later on in the story; it’s also what builds guilt in the zookeepers. It also has an effect on the reader to really feel with the animals, almost in a way where you’re on their side and not on the army’s and in a way the zookeepers as well. I know that the imagery used throughout the story(like in the excerpt above) made me, personally,  totally upset with the zookeepers I felt as if I had become part of the story and wanted to tell the zookeepers to do something, this occurred because of the detail used by the author to describe the elephants. It changes the way you look at the elephants, each time they’re described you feel bad for them.

The author makes it evident that the zookeepers want to help the elephants but in this case the authority is not fully in their hands to do so. Their lack of helping will lead to their guilt aforesaid. They want so badly to help the elephants but no matter how much the elephants seem to beg and how much the zookeepers want to feed them, they can’t. This is evident throughout the whole story. At one point their trainer couldn’t stand it any longer, “‘Oh Tonky! Oh Wanly!’ he wailed and dashed to their food shed. He carried food and pails of water to them and threw at their feet.” Of course this action is due to the way that their appearance makes them look innocent. In the same way that the author uses detail to stretch the idea of their innocence, these details are also noticed by the zookeepers and affect them in a similar way. After that point in the story, the zookeepers try hard to ignore the elephants, avoiding passing by their cage. It's a terrible feeling to sort of avoid speaking or conversing with a person, or animal in this case and then having to see them dead. I know, I've been there, my uncle died a few years back and I remember looking back and thinking what you could have done better. In the same way the zookeepers will look back at their actions and regret not feeding the elephants and purposefully avoiding them, it shows me that they have no courage to even pass by the elephant cages; they know that the elephants will lure them into feeding them because of their purity. But the guilt will stick to them as you'll soon learn when you read more into this response and looking back this may have been a reason why this guilt is there.

            After the elephants died the zookeepers ran into their cage, getting the closest they had to the elephants since they were ordered to kill the elephants. I felt that this specific part of the story, the opening of their cages, was symbolic. When it was locked, the cage symbolized being weak and in pain, just like the elephants. With the cage open, it symbolized freedom. From this point in the story I predict that it must have hit the zookeepers that they could’ve prevented this from happening, this is where the guilt begins to come in play. There is a part of the story where they cut the elephants bodies open and this is how the author describes them, “Nothing was found in their washtub-like stomachs-not even a single drop of water.” The elephants had done nothing wrong, like their stomachs’ they were also empty and clean of any wrong-doing. The author emphasizes on their washtub- like stomachs’ that could have been filled with so many things, but they were filled with nothing. “They [the zookeepers] took hold of Tonky’s and Wanly’s thin bodies, as if to shake them back to life. Everyone burst into tears,” this just shows how much the zookeepers can’t let go of the elephant’s innocence.

 The zookeepers had done nothing wrong either, don’t get me wrong, but when things are left in your hands but you have no power to make a decision, you can’t always do what you want. The zookeepers were ordered to kill the elephants by the army. I’m sure that the army moved on after making the decision, they most likely hadn’t put all that much thought into it. But the zookeepers were the ones who watched the elephants as they slipped by them slowly to their deaths. They were the ones in control of whether the elephants ate or not. This is another reason why I believe the guilt sticks with them even though it was obvious that they didn’t want to kill the elephants. I also noticed a small detail at the end of the story that proves this point, "With tears in his eyes the zookeeper [the one telling the story] finished his story….He was still patting the tombstone tenderly.” This shows that the story must be of sentimental value to him, he must have been a zookeeper at the time of the elephants and still the story touches him emotionally years later.

“Faithful Elephants: A True Story of Animals, People and War”, really teaches you that sometimes higher authority can lead you and or force you in a way, to do things that you don’t want to. It also shows you that you’re going to regret many things that you do in life and not everything is going to have a happy ending, where you forget these things. It shows the truth and reality of life. Another message is that when you hurt somebody that’s innocent in anyway, there’s always going to be pain within you that sticks with you whether you meant to do it or not. These lessons can relate to and be very important to teenagers, as myself, you can’t take everything for granted and you won’t always get what you want in life and you’re going to have to live through guilt, regret and tough times.