Burroughs’s The Son of Tarzan operates as a motif throughout the novel, recurring as a shared text between Bagger and Arno that refracts the themes of surrogate fatherhood, inherited violence, and The Power of Narrative to Shape Reality and Survival. The pulp adventure provides the framework for both characters to interpret their relationship and their war. Bagger reads aloud to Arno, inserting fabricated obscenities into the text, yet finds himself “engaged by the plot” (16) despite his contempt for its boyish fantasies. The act of reading together forges the bond Bagger spends the novel denying, transforming a dime novel into a surrogate scripture as emotionally binding as the Bishop’s Bible.

The motif’s meaning shifts as the novel progresses. Early on, the book represents escapism and innocence, a child’s adventure consumed amid real carnage. But when Bagger reflects that Korak “killed because he felt like killing” (100), the parallel between fictional jungle violence and battlefield slaughter becomes explicit. The adventure tradition’s glorification of masculine aggression is exposed as being complicit in the ideology that sustains war. The motif reaches its crisis when Bagger fabricates an ending in which Tarzan kills Korak, a father-son duel to the death that foreshadows the novel’s own pattern of lethal surrogate bonds. Arno later rejects this invented conclusion, reasoning that Tarzan would rather sacrifice himself than harm his son. Arno’s revision corrects the narrative Bagger imposed on the narrative, asserting that selflessness, not dominance, defines the parent’s role. This offers Bagger a model he will ultimately follow in his relationship with Arno.

The severed horse head that Ben Veck hollows out and wears as a mask functions as a symbol of psychological refuge through self-erasure. Veck arrives at Company P already traumatized by combat and by the institutional racism that set the 368th Infantry Regiment up to fail. He experiences a persistent trembling that marks him as a man whose identity has been ground down by forces beyond his control. When he encounters the shrapnel-torn horse, he carefully extracts its contents and fits the head over his own, an act the other soldiers find unsettling. For Veck, however, the horse head visibly calms him: “… he’s acting almost normal if that’s a word you can apply to a guy wearing a severed horse head…” (131) The horse head soothes Veck because it offers him an identity unburdened by the expectations and humiliations heaped on a Black soldier in a predominantly white regiment.

The symbol also connects to the novel’s pervasive imagery of war’s dehumanizing machinery. Horses are among the conflict’s most numerous casualties, and by wearing one’s remains, Veck merges with the war’s animal victims, rather than the war’s human perpetrators. When he carries the angel while wearing the mask, the narrative describes the traveling party as “one man, one beast, one boy, one centaur, and one angel” (116), a mythic assemblage in which Veck occupies the hybrid position. The centaur is a creature of two natures, and so is Veck: soldier and victim, protector and threat. By the time Veck strips naked before his final act, the removal of the horse head signals that he has also shed any remaining buffer between himself and annihilation.

Disarticulated body parts constitute a motif that recurs with relentless frequency, illustrating how industrial warfare dismantles the concept of individual human identity. From the opening pages, Bagger catalogues corpses as inventories of anatomy: “… one dead doughboy nearly beheaded by a pelvic bone, another who bit it collecting his intestines in one of his boots, a third stomped so flat by a shell that his spinal column protrudes from his gaping mouth…” (4). The passage establishes the motif’s governing logic, in which a body becomes legible only as a collection of severed components. This fragmentation extends to the living: Popkin’s trench-mouth gums, Veck’s trembling jaw, and Bagger’s face coated in another man’s blood. All of these details present the living human body as a site already undergoing disassembly.

The motif intersects with the theme of The Brutal Reality of War Versus Idealized Masculinity by exposing the grotesque gap between the Army’s rhetoric of wholeness and valor and the physical reality it produces. Soldiers are supposed to be unified instruments of national will, yet the landscape they inhabit is marked with arms holding hands without bodies, tongues hiding in trenches like vipers, and a dismembered ear that Bagger peels from his own cheek. His impulse to pin that ear to his lapel “a medal more useful than the Croix de Guerre” (12) crystallizes the motif’s darkest irony: In a war that awards medals for destroying bodies, the body part itself becomes the truest decoration, an honest emblem of what combat actually achieves.