4 ideas
Bereft and isolated, he is drawn in by a militia figure into the war economy of arms and smuggling. By the end he has adopted its brutal masculinity, committing sexual violence and laughing, and the novel presents this as his becoming a 'man.'
In a militarized society, gentleness and sexual ambiguity become untenable because every man is sorted into fighter or feminized non-fighter, and the second position has no protection. The man who refuses violence is not left alone. Through grief, isolation, and the loss of the people who sheltered him, he is steadily pushed toward the only identity that confers safety and belonging, which is the aggressor's.
Khalil's retreat into housekeeping, bodily care, and illness inside his apartment can be read as a form of non-participation, a private zone where the war's codes of manhood do not apply. The novel shows that such refuge erodes: the outside violence seeps in through deaths, shortages, and visitors. Withdrawal only delays absorption into the war; it cannot stand as a lasting stance against it.
The novel treats the capacity to laugh in the face of cruelty as the signal that a person has crossed into the perpetrator's world. Khalil's closing laughter replaces his earlier vulnerability and sorrow, turning an emotion normally linked to lightness into evidence of petrification. It shows that the character has stopped feeling the violence as wrong.