What Is The Ethical Issue In Daniel Woodrell's Woe To Live On?

In Woe to Live On, by Daniel Woodrell, Jake Roedel experiences massacres, love, and ethical challenges during his adventures on the Kansas-Missouri Border during the Civil War. He joins a band Bushwhackers and searches the border Jayhawkers. When these two forces come in contact, battles ensue and result in the loss of countless lives. To survive in constant conflict, both sides ransack houses and kill civilians to find food and supplies. These events cause moral conflict inside Roedel and cause him to question what is right and wrong during war. Woodrell demonstrates the false sense of morality that soldiers gain from war and the true loss of ethics while providing examples of ethical behavior by Roedel as a model for ethical behavior.
Roedel shows mercy by only killing men for good reason. He demonstrates this mercy when he “gave no warning but the cocking of [his] Navy Colt and booked the boy passage with his father” because “Pups make hounds…And there are hounds enough” (8). Roedel kills a boy to spare him from further torment and fighting. He performs this act out of mercy and necessity. At one point, the Bushwhackers torment a captive Federal soldier by reading him letters from his wife, and Roedel shoots him “where he lay and put a period to the letter” (62). Roedel recognizes the cruelty and ends the man’s misery quickly. He shows his ethics by ending pointless torment. These acts of mercy contrast the cruel and meaningless slaughter other soldiers perform. During the raid on Lawrence, Bushwhackers murder countless citizens despite that fact that “there was no army in sight” and that “the citizens never even fired a shot to defend themselves” (174). This slaughter has no justice or reason behind it. The soldiers perform it out of rage, in dark contrast to Roedel’s mercy. This slaughter shows how the war and fighting degrades the soldier’s