Barber’s Dilemma Of Good And Evil In Just Lather, That’s All By Hernando Tellez
Everyday is a struggle to make the right decision between what is right and what is wrong. Or what is good and what is evil. Or what is moral and what is immoral. In “Just Lather, That’s All” by Hernando Tellez, the barber encounters this problem. He must decide if he should kill Captain Torres or give him a shave. The reason the barber even feels he needs to make this decision in the beginning is because he wants to get revenge for all the rebels that Torres has killed. However, having the choice to end a human being’s life is not something that is meant to be taken lightly. The barber’s morals are being tested as he contemplates the consequences of his decision to take a man’s life. In the end, the barber decides not to kill Captain Torres. This shows that the author is trying to convey the message that everyone experiences a point in their life where they question what the right thing to do is.
Firstly, the barber believes that killing captain Torres will be a nuisance. The barber says, “From his throat a stream of blood would flow on the sheet, over the chair, down on my hands, onto the floor… the blood would go flowing along the floor… until it reached the street like a small scarlet river”. The Barber thinks that it is easy to kill Torres. He imagines the mess that the blood would create and worries about how he would clean it up. He knows he would be caught easily. In addition, the barber would not be able to live a simple life anymore. The barber says, “...what would I do with the body? Where would I hide it? I would have to flee, leave all this behind, take shelter far away... But they would follow until they caught up with me”.
The barber clearly does not know how to kill a man and get away with it. He knows that he would have to leave everything behind him and this would ruin his life. He would have to find a place to hide and he would be on the run his entire life until he got caught. The barber understands that murdering Torres is morally wrong and it would create more problems than it can solve. The barber says, “No! No one deserves the sacrifice others make in becoming assassins. What is to be gained by it? Nothing. Others and still others keep coming, and the first kill the second, and then these kill the next, and so on until everything becomes a sea of blood”.
No matter what the circumstances are, the barber knows that killing another human being is wrong. He thinks about if killing the captain would really help anyone but it probably would not because he could just be replaced with someone much worse and evil. Also, he brings up the point that if he was to kill Torres, a war would start. The members on the Captain’s side could retaliate and end up killing a member from the rebel’s side or they may even kill the barber. This would cause both members from the opposing sides to keep killing each other until nobody was left standing. Also, the barber knows that his personal life and work life are two different things that should not clash together. The barber says, “Yes. I was secretly a revolutionary, but at the same time I was a conscientious barber, proud of the way I did my job”. The barber is described as someone who does his work honorably. He has pride towards his profession because he loves what he does. He thinks that Torres deserves to have a professional shave like any other customer who walks into his barber shop. Also, the barber does not want his respected reputation or respectability to tarnish because he is known as being the best barber in the town. The people love what he does and they trust how he works.
Overall, everyone questions what the right thing to do actually is sometimes. Although, it is easy to say you will do something, it is a lot harder to actually pull through with it. In the barber’s position he literally holds the Captain’s life in his hands. He chooses not to get blood on his hands because he believes serious repercussions would result from it and it would just make things a lot worse than they already are. Even though the barber knows Captain Torres is a bad man, he also knows it is not his place to act on it.
