by his experiences in the war. When Michael returns to bring Nick back, he finds his friend not only mute but drug-addicted and addicted as well to the notion of suicide. One might argue that muteness itself is a kind of suicide which precedes Nick's actual suicide. If we see language and speech as making up the most basic self-expression of the human being, then the choice (conscious or unconscious) to give up that form of expression is a kind of self-negation, or suicide.
Nick is truly hopeless when Michael finds him, but Michael, in his love for his friend and his frantic desire to help him and bring him back from the land of the living dead, almost descends himself into self-destruction. In the end it is only Nick who dies, but certainly the message of the film is that Nick's suicide was almost a blessing. Nick was alive, but it can hardly be called a life. The experience of war first-hand had comp
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