[Blarg]

Luke was a great tragedy. Like a Hitchcock hero who does something incredibly innocuous to get himself into a world of nightmare, being punished by the universe for straying from the straight and narrow and the protection of the gods just a little bit, Luke makes a small perverse step into doom out of sheer orneriness and dissatisfaction with life. He should have just kept it to himself, like all the rest of us do, and trudged on. But he tempted the gods by asking for their favor, and they didn't grant it. And when he had the chance to just pretend the world was all right with him, to bow down to the obstinate gods just a little and try to conform and get back in their good graces, he refused. Like Lucifer and Adam, he had to thumb his nose at God and say his will was his own, even if it caused a terrible fall from grace. And then step into his doom.

Who among us hasn't felt that he wanted and deserved some dignity and a fair shake once in a while, and that he stubbornly would not be bowed and would take all the consequences -- even if the only reason he had to take any worse consequences than he had already were that he, like Luke, had willfully gotten himself into the fixes that were grinding him down? When Luke, coming from nothing, gives up the ghost at that parking meter, he still wants to retain a sense of his own self and power as he goes down the long preordained slide into annihilation. He knows where he's going. But he wants a shred of dignity in his rapid decay, even if all he would have to do is give it up to avert his doom. He wants to be beloved of God even as he spites him and dares him to show his face. His essential battle is against God, who asks only that he surrender his will. But this is too much to ask of him.

"Say you like us. Just say you like us," say the military bigwigs to Yossarian in the hospital at the end of Catch-22. That's all Luke had to do, too, to survive. To have never gotten himself into this whole mess in the first place. Just conform, surrender. Give in.

But it wasn't in his nature. Not enough. In a way, it's not in human nature; that's what makes us humans. That's why the fall was inevitable. Luke represents a part of all our souls. The one that tells the gods to screw off and gets its ass kicked out of the garden. The one that wants its own soul.

Luke didn't start in much of a garden. We don't know his original troubles too much, except for a sad family life, which isn't unique to him. But it doesn't matter; he's in our world, and that's explanation enough. As in classical tragedy, Luke is a toy of the Gods, who punish him for their amusement after they have set him up with the character and circumstances that make his fall a foregone conclusion. It was not Luke's character to survive, because he couldn't surrender. Because he thought the whole thing was a farce and full of crap. And he was right. To the gods, his travails were a cosmic joke. When he was taken down, despite being humbled, it was still smarting off, flicking a middle finger at destiny, being himself, and he was grateful to get out of a rigged game. He knew the joke of existence, and was glad to finally get to the punchline.