I am writing this partly to get it clear in my head and to help me make up my mind. I think what I will do is wait and watch until late afternoon. Then if he still has not come out of the tent, I will go down while it is still light, very quietly, and see if I can see, without getting too close, how he is. I will take my gun with me.
One of the most pressing emotions in this quote is the extreme caution and premonition with which Ann operates, despite being a teenager without someone around to guide her. It is calm, collected, and calculated thinking that allows her to survey a situation, make an informed decision, and account (at least sometimes) for the unintended consequences that often arise. But, on the other hand, her caution also causes Mr. Loomis to get sick in the first place (because she did not warn him that the water he was about to bathe in is radioactive) and so it is to her detriment that she takes too long to make decisions. The end result, however, is that she is able to trick Mr. Loomis and take the suit with her.
I just realized that, after all this, I still do not even know his name.
The lack of knowledge that Ann has about Mr. Loomis is telling insofar as it speaks to her compassion and desire to help this new stranger feel better. It also speaks to the stark departure from her cautionary behavior when Mr. Loomis first arrived and she observed him. In other words, she lets her guard down, and it leads her to house a stranger whose name she does not know. However it also brings out the desperation that Ann has in befriending another human after months of no contact with anyone else.
So I made several trips to the store for supplies. It was all canned stuff, of course, or dried. There would not be anything fresh except milk and eggs until I could get the garden going again.
Ann's trips to the store and harvest planning bring out the responsibility she demonstrates throughout the story. She thinks carefully and meticulously about her circumstances, and has no problem incorporating concerns of Mr. Loomis into her quotidian routine, which itself is already quite impressive for a teenager living by herself. On the other hand, it leaves her vulnerable to the manipulative tendencies of Mr. Loomis later on. It is only to a certain degree that she is able to accommodate the shock of Mr. Loomis' hostile behavior.
To my surprise he seemed extremely pleased, almost excited. "Could you?" he said. "I haven't heard music for more than a year."
When Mr. Loomis is still sick, he acts quite soothingly to Ann - his behavior aligns with what Ann imagined would happen when another person came into her life. Both Ann and Mr. Loomis are delighted to be able to socialize after a long time, but this contrasts with the way they behave with each other later on. In fact, there is a great irony in the fact that what both have wanted for such a long time - interaction with and consolation in another human being - is precisely the cause of so much misery, conflict, and eventually separation. What they have searched and longed for is something they begin to take issue with. This can be read as a kind of allusion to what initially caused the war in the first place. Have humans (or at least what is left of them) really learned from such a catastrophe? O'Brien leaves the reader with this question.
The first page said "A is for Adam," and there was a picture of Adam standing near an apple tree, dressed in a long white robe - which disagrees with the Bible, but of course it was for small children. Next came "B is for Benjamin." "C is for Christian," and so on. The last page of all was "Z is for Zachariah," and since I knew that Adam was the first man, for a long time I assumed that Zachariah must be the last man.
This is the only time the title of the book is invoked in any way in the book itself. Ann is speaking of the book she read in Sunday School, and her understanding of Zachariah as the last man symbolizes in some ways her own situation: what she perceives as the last person may not actually be the case. It can also be read as the fallibility of humans: whereas Adam committed the original sin, Zachariah (if we read Zachariah as the last human on earth, whether that is Mr. Loomis or Ann) committed the last.
So to me the idea of getting married seemed like quite an enormous step. Still I thought, when Mr. Loomis recovered from his sickness, there was no reason why we could not plan to be married in a year; that is, next June, perhaps on my seventeenth birthday.
It may surprise the reader to learn about the seemingly incredulous thoughts that Ann has about marriage. But her circumstances lend us a charitable lens through which to understand her thought process. What is it that causes a teenager to imagine marrying a man whom she does not know, whom she has just met? She also sees her birthday as the perfect occasion on which to get married. Her thoughts bring to the fore the human desire for meaningful relationships. It is possible that the arrival of Mr. Loomis reveals an entire world of new possibilities, and it is purely in the contemplation of those possibilities that Ann finds pleasure. It is unclear the currency that these thoughts and daydreams hold in actually bringing about the events that define them to fruition.
A strange thing had occurred. Though we had both known the fever was coming, and I had dreaded it more than he had (or more than he had seemed to), now that it was there, and he was visibly distressed, my own fear seemed to vanish. I felt calm - almost as if I were the older one. It was as if when he got weaker, I got stronger. I suppose that is why doctors and nurses could last through terrible epidemics.
This quote illustrates one of the greatest moments of compassion that Ann has in the book. She expresses a lot of empathy and kindness for someone she has just met. It also shows how much she can improvise in caring for another, incredibly sick individual. She is not aware of the mechanics of long-term medical attention. At the same time, she establishes a special kind of emotional bond with Mr. Loomis - she feels herself getting stronger as Mr. Loomis (or so she perceives) gets weaker.
What I had feared was true. There were three holes, spaced about two inches apart, across the middle of the chest.
This is when Ann inspects Mr. Loomis's safe suit to confirm whether Mr. Loomis shot Edward or not. The evidence overwhelmingly points to the affirmative, and Ann is horrified. It alludes to the fact that she does not know many things about Mr. Loomis and how this can actually be a source of tension for her. Moreover it is also raises the question: if things are this bad when Mr. Loomis is sick, then what will happen once he gets better. In some sense, this remains under the threshold of Ann's awareness, though she certainly begins to consider the ramifications of keeping a stranger in her house.
I played the piano for half an hour, hoping it would penetrate to wherever he was.
Again this is a moment of compassion and sociability that Ann expresses. She plays the piano (in addition to holding Mr. Loomis' hand and reading him a book) entirely on her own accord, out of her own hospitality. It shows her improvisation as well: she lacks healthcare and medical acumen but nonetheless uses what is at hand (kind of like a bricoleur) in order to find novel solutions to protracted or pressing problems. Though playing a piano does not address Mr. Loomis's sickness, it may serve in Ann's perspective as a method of ameliorating his pain.
"To church?" He sounded as if he could not believe. "To church?" He lay back in the bed. "How long did that take?"
This quote represents the axial pivot in Mr. Loomis's behavior. It is spoken when he first attempts to take charge, when he realizes that he is going to live and finds an urge to exert and establish his authority - or at least express some kind of agency. He fails to understand, at least from Ann's perspective, the significance of her trips to the church: that they were for him, for his well-being. It is the beginning of a series of processes that communicate a sense of loss of authority, autonomy, and agency to Ann.
