The Lords of Discipline

“‘You have a home in Charleston now, Will,’ she had said. ‘You can use that key anytime you want to, whether we’re here or not’ ” 

Will finds a surrogate family with Tradd, Commerce, and Abigail St. Croix, prosperous Charlestonians who welcome him despite his different social class. In essence, their home is his home, a fact that Abigail symbolizes through the gift of a house key.

“I have never had to look up a definition of honor. It is something I had the day I was born, and I never had to question where it came from or by what right it was mine” 

These words, which are directed at Will, underscore one of the fundamental differences between the duty-bound General and the more skeptical cadet he addresses. Will is resistant to the mythology of honor and community that the Institute promotes; the General, in contrast, is the ultimate human embodiment of that mythology.

“Glad you’ve got a sense of humor, dumbhead. You’re going to need it. Good luck and welcome to the most miserable year in your entire life” 

In his own difficult time as a plebe, Will used humor as a coping mechanism—a fact that may explain why he praises Pearce’s own sense of humor. The African-American Pearce is indeed in for a uniquely “miserable” year, and will need humor of his own to deal with a level of prejudice and alienation that Will had never personally experienced.

“The Institute was doing its job well and preparing its two thousand sons in the barracks to die prettily for their country. And there was this splendid reward for dying: You got your portrait in the library” 

Directly opposing his adamantly pro-war classmates, Will has repeatedly questioned the value and the logic of the hostilities in Vietnam. He has no interest in participating in the war itself, and his bitingly sarcastic statement about the “splendid reward” that awaits those who die in combat shows just how much he sees some types of aggression as exercises in futility.

“I’ve been around men long enough to know that all they want is a woman who’ll make them feel smart and handsome and superior

Annie Kate is a young woman, and would seem at first to have little cause for the cynicism expressed here. Yet as the progress of the novel indicates, she has experienced abandonment and class prejudice, and has reason for perceiving men to be selfish and insecure.

“Tell me how to get out of this, Will. I want to walk away from this. But I want to do it honorably. I don’t want them screaming at me or laughing at me” 

“They all looked the same to me, a race of bald, timorous zombies chanting a debased, newly minted language in a country alive with cruelty” 

Many of the plebe year activities are meant to break down the Institute freshmen—to place them under as much physical and psychological pressure as possible before building them back into “Whole Men.” Will here acknowledges the dehumanizing effects of the plebe routines, but later learns to survive in the same setting that for a time seemed “alive with cruelty.”

“Two years ago I was standing where you’re standing tonight. Hell Night was the worst night I ever spent. I tried to quit the next day. If you stick this out, it will be worth all the pain” 

Even in the midst of the worst of the plebe system, the Institute offers the hope of honor, achievement, and dignity to its most determined students. Maccabee is aware of this fact of Institute life, and shares such a realization with the younger Will—who shows promise as a student but whose plebe ordeals, it seems, have only begun.

“I had tried hard for anonymity in R Company and had achieved it. I had perfected a bland personality, a bland appearance, and a bland record” 

Will’s decision to publish a poem critical of the upperclassmen—and thus to break his “anonymity”—proves to be a grievous misstep. In fact, the “Taming” to which Will is subjected involves singling him out for especially harsh treatment—a further blow to the “bland” presence that Will had attempted to cultivate at the Institute.

“The genius of the Institute lay in its complete mastery of all rites of passage, both great and small” 

Though often critical of the Institute and aware of its deficiencies, Will is nonetheless attracted to the powerful ceremonies that define Institute life. These ceremonies begin with the “recognition” of plebes and lead up to graduation, giving students milestones to look forward to even in the midst of the Institute’s harshest ordeals.

“How does one communicate in the barracks at all without using profanity? It’s the only language that anyone understands. It’s the natural language for this environment” 

Will’s comments are somewhat offhand and sarcastic, but they indicate an important truth about the nature of life at the Institute. This is a college that places little emphasis on delicacy, that molds “Whole Men” through treatment that the outside world would see as brutish and severe—and through the “natural language” of such treatment, profanity.

“If someone gets too close or too personal, then I can tell a joke or say something sarcastic and redirect the conversation. It’s an old trick of mine, but I’ll try not to use it on you” 

For Will, humor is a defense mechanism, one that has helped him to survive the worst that the Institute has to offer. Now, in the company of Annie Kate, he feels that he can abandon such defensive and wary reactions to the world; he wants to find a more straightforward way to communicate with her in these early stages of their romance.

“I loved county fairs in the South. It was hard to believe that anything could be so consistently cheap and showy and vulgar year after year” 

“I call it a search for quality. I’ve looked at my life carefully and I’ve made solicitous choices about what is truly important to me” 

Abigail can be an awkward and emotional woman, but there is little doubt that she is still a prominent representative of Old Charleston society at its most refined. Here, she claims that such refinement involves conscious effort, “solicitous choices” that have formed her as a person.

“Rumors were all I could find when I was writing my history. Rumors make for captivating speculation but questionable history, sir” 

“Now I know what it is like to love a woman, now I have touched the magic source, now I know why it is like nothing else in the world” 

Will’s romance with Annie Kate contains ecstatic, revelatory moments. Though the bond between these two characters does not endure, such contact gives Will new moments of high emotion and a new sense of maturity.

“God, how I love this game and how I wish I had been better at it. The happiest days of my boyhood were spent above the woodshine of oak and below the gaze of both friendly and hostile crowds” 

Here, Will acknowledges that his time at the Institute has been more than a brutal and dehumanizing ordeal. His studies there have given him the opportunity to play basketball—to stand out in his own way, and to pursue a sport that he regards with abiding affection.

“That’s the way I feel about this school sometimes. I think it’s doing me a lot of good because so many people tell me it’s good for me. But it hurts” 

Will’s ambivalent relationship to the Institute is one of the most important features of his character, and a feature that guides Conroy’s entire novel. In this quotation, Will admits his ambivalence to Pearce, a character who also occupies a conflicted position as a young man who fits the Institute’s codes of excellence but is mistreated on account of his race.

“I know that I am afraid of them. That they stole the letter is unspeakable. That they eradicated their name from my historical account is unspeakable. They are scoundrels of the first order” 

“I realized that I had, at last, fulfilled my destiny as a cadreman, as a breaker of men. Was I doing all this for Poteete and Pearce and Bentley, or was I doing this because of a runaway megalomania I could not control? 

Will has long resisted participating in the most brutal customs of the Institute. Here, he gives way to violence, though in this case he is lashing out against a member of a nefarious secret society, not victimizing a harmless underclassman.

“We fought them all the way, the four of us, together, as brothers, as close as any guys in the world can be, and now you’re telling me that I’m not even going to be a name to you. I’m not even going to be a name to you? I’m not even going to be alive to you” 

“I only wanted to listen to the voice. ‘I will get them,’ the voice said. ‘I will get them’ ” 

With Pig’s death, Will is motivated to take down The Ten—not simply out of his sense of social righteousness, but by a need for vengeance. Although he knows that he is outnumbered, he believes the sheer passion that motivates him may lead to victory.

“It never occurred to me that I might be a better man than you were, General. And that I would meet many far better men at the Institute

In his verbal jousting with the General, Will strikes a direct blow against the aura of dignity, legend, and perfection that surrounds the famous military man. The general is flustered by Will’s words, yet Will is secure in the idea that other men—Mark, the Bear, and the more upstanding of his classmates—possess strengths of character that the General doesn’t.