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Stanton\'s decision to assassinate Willie, whom he knows only as an abstraction, characterizes the objective scientist in him. To Stanton, Willie is a cancer, not a human being. The doctor\'s temporary substitution of \"pure force\" for \"pure idea,\" therefore, is no reversal since both positions are remote from the human median. What Adam\'s action does allow, however, is the double irony of a man\'s being killed by his favorite weapon at the very moment he has decided to lay it aside--a dramatic assertion of the penalties attendant on evil self-willed. Although Willie dies ignorant of Adam\'s motives and perhaps of his own, yet when he insists on his deathbed that life could have been different he is accepting the notion that his will has always been to some degree free and that he can be blamed or credited to that extent for actions now formally his. In this manner he attempts to rescue identity, to prevent himself from being reduced to mere function in a mechanical universe.
-Leonard Casper, Robert Penn Warren, 1960
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