Death as Mundane

Faced with stories of death on an almost daily basis, the Israeli citizens of Rutu Modan’s “Exit Wounds” often find themselves emotionally detached from the deaths that occur all around them.  The story follows Koby, a young cab driver who is approached by the tall, gangly Numi who believes that his father was killed in a recent bombing at a bus station.  One victim of the bombing remains unidentified and Numi’s suspicion is launched by the appearance of a scarf at the scene.  When Numi explains her theory to Koby he is initially skeptical, content to distance himself from his estranged father.  On p. 37 Numi produces the newspaper article about the attack, and the characters discuss the tragedy in a detached, almost nonchalant manner.  Opening the newspaper, Koby merely remarks “look at those poor bastards” as her peruses tragic images of wounded bodies, shocked and confused bystanders, emotionally distraught relatives, and ambulance workers carrying body bags off the street.  In the novel Modan uses vibrant colors in her illustrations, such as bright red or yellow to depict Numi’s clothes, or in a strikingly beautiful scene of a rural sunset; however, on p. 37, the scene of the attack is depicted in the gray tones of a newspaper.  This sudden and distinct lack of color depreciates the violence of the scene, as the gruesome, bloodied bodies in gray color appear underwhelming in comparison to the rest of the novel’s vivid color scheme.

A few pages later death is once again rendered mundane in a scene at the morgue.  The second chapter opens on p. 45 with a panel of a corpse lying on a trolley as a worker washes away a bright red stream of blood.  A series of panels depict the everyday working aspects of the morgue, as workers shuttle corpses through different rooms, nail coffins shut, and fill out paperwork.  At the bottom of the page, a worker leans over an open corpse, its brightly colored organs blatantly displayed.  As she digs through the mass of organs, pulling out a long, snake-like intestine, she discusses lunch with a coworker:  “how about Chinese?”  The next shot shows the same coworker sawing through a lump of pink brain.  By opening the scene in this fashion, Modan highlights the banality of death in the morgue, where displaced organs coexist with lunch plans.  As the scene continues, death is continually understated, as a man comes in to identify a relative by comparing ears and asks for a videotape of the body, pleasantly discussing the matter with the cheery receptionist.  When Numi and Koby arrive to find the unidentified body has been buried, the receptionist smiles broadly stating “knock on wood, there’s no shortage of bodies in this country” (48).

Even as Modan represents death as an everyday, common occurrence in a society that distances themselves from tragedy as a defense mechanism from the continual violence that hovers around them, she subtly captures the personal anguish of lost family members–Koby’s father’s ritualistic habit of visiting his deceased wife’s grave, and the cafe owner’s wife who grimaces and wipes an unseen tear from her eye when she reminisces about his lost husband.  At the end of the novel when Numi and Koby discover that Gabriel still lives, the revelation is bittersweet.  As Numi says “I wish he was dead.  I wish it really was his body,” she expresses the intense grief felt by abandonment, where Gabriel’s death seems less painful than his rejection.  In this way, the novel’s title “Exit Wounds”–which conjures images of physical destruction–instead represents a deeper pain, the pain felt by rejection, the deep emotional wound left by a loved one’s departure.