When one can accept the unchanging definitive statement "men die and they are not happy," the indifference of the universe is inescapable. Man dies because the human condition both wills it and allows it. The definitive act of defiance and of superiority over the human condition is to defeat Nature with her own weapon, is to bring about death at will (truly, one’s last will).

For the protagonist of Steps suicide is an act of the present. In performing it a man chooses to escape from his future and from his past, thus overcoming the knowledge that he will die.

By suicide, he takes over a natural function. To die in nature’s time is to accede to a denial of man’s dignity: to die in one’s own time is to affirm that dignity. Man has the power to choose — it is his comfort in the face of the predictable.

In committing suicide, the man makes himself historical (that is, people can and must preface their statements about him with "he was"). He is transferring the burden of his past onto the shoulders of the world, onto history.

But even in self-destruction, his shadow outlives him. He imposes on other people the necessity for remembering and for judging him, for summarizing him as a character. He creates the means to outlive himself.

Sade’s vision is theatrical because he reduces the other person to his most basic characteristics. He shows only those facets which advance his own intended action. Sade behaves in scenes, each with its own specific result. The other person, then, becomes a function of his purpose. Automatically, the other person is the stage onto which Sade projects a form of his past. In this way he acts out the self, obtains a kind of purgation derived from the scene which does not last beyond the scene’s physical duration. Thus Sade must act again and again — without lasting satisfaction, without the true recognition of having discarded the forms of his past. In forcing history to summarize him in a word, he has obliterated his self, but has marked his survivors with chosen forms of his past, with his particular shadow.

For the protagonist of Steps memories carry no emotions: they exist as incidents, as concise dramas. He does not remember (i.e. experience) his past emotion or pain. He can recall his response to a specific incident in the past — a movement of the mind, a physical reaction — but he cannot re-experience the pain or the emotion proper which produced this response.

For the protagonist of Steps emotions have no memories: they exist only in the present. When he reads emotion into memory, he is acting in the present, spontaneously filling in the structures of the drama with feeling (this is similar to what one does when engrossed in a play or in music). Thus he is revisiting the present.

A speculative aside: memories have no emotions, and emotions have no memories. Perhaps that is why the Nazis were compelled to create emotive memories in order to hold the German people within the strictures of the past and make spontaneous present action impossible. Their purpose was to create a crippled group past and maintain it in an almost frozen state.

A direct way to achieve such a situation was to create an emotionally recalled enemy. Such an enemy had to be easily identifiable — and have certain stereotyped characteristics — thus heightening the emotions. In purging an "unhealthy" mass element, a nation was really attempting to purge the unhealthy (the unacceptable) in i itself. This selected group served as a screen on which one could project one’s own individually crippled past. This was acting out a sheer transference.

Does a man’s commission of a crime take for granted his commitment of himself to it? Or is guilt a choice after the fact? Does a time come when a man judges himself? What makes a man guilty in his own eyes?

Do the Germans feel guilt? Have they ever chosen to admit to themselves the crimes they committed? The Nazi actions, unlike Meursault’s killing of the Arab in L’Etranger, were not totally gratuitous: they were planned and carried out, premeditated in the extreme. The case of the Nazis accepting the crime is not merely that of accepting the black humor of an indifferent universe. Bending to the will of a totally gratuitous circumstance is not the same as choosing guilt. If the Germans as a nation accept a communal guilt, they do not necessarily as individuals accept a personal one. Communal guilt still leaves the individual innocent.

Deliberately to choose as a victim an individual or a group with a definable past to eliminate spontaneity from murder, surpasses in its impersonality even ritual killing, since it is devoid of emotion. Rational murder is the ultimate anti-theatre. Theatre implies agon, a struggle between two forces; it is essentially two-sided because it depicts the struggle within an intimate relationship. Massacre, then, is also ultimate anti-theatre; the holocaust (one- sided horror) is contrary to the ultimate theatre, to truly emotional killing.

Whereas ritual murder at least implies the superiority of the murderer — the priority of the persecutor over the persecuted — mass murder on the scale of the holocaust dissolves this distinction in the bureaucracy. Bureaucracy entails levels of routine, duties to be performed, patterns which preclude passion. Hannah Arendt’s term, "the banality of evil," is apt; mass acting out is usually devoid of drama.

When the boy in Steps kills the children, he is performing a drama at the level of a relationship with a stranger. He selects only those facets of the individual which suit his action. Thus the victims are never personalities but characters, pure attributes. They are the means to an end, and (as the boy perceives them) they carry that end in themselves. They are children of certain parents — indispensable to him because they can be killed and because their deaths will produce the desired effect on both the killer and the parents. They are simply the instruments of revenge, not intimately enough involved with the boy to make their murder a crime of passion. They serve a specific purpose, however; the crime defines them lucidly enough to make their deaths take on the character of ritual murder.

Perhaps these murders satisfy the murderer’s sense of self and gain for him an increased solidity, a temporary freedom, a previously unreachable equality, and at the same time an absolute superiority. These are rituals of drama, drama, just as Sade’s erotic situations are ritual acts and dramas. The boundaries between acting and acting out are obliterated.