Thus, we can say that the ground upon which the narrator stands is similar to the major's at the end of the remembered experienced. Wounded by life, the storyteller recalls his earlier predicament as a young man physically wounded in the war. Struggling, also, for a way to heal his psychic wound— his sense of estrangement in the present—he recalls the context of healing in the new pavilions at the hospitals in Milan. Just as his body could not be restored to wholeness by the machines, neither could his estrangement as a young man be overcome by trying to be a hunting hawk. The death of the major's wife, therefore, is intensely relevant to the narrator's present condition. At the conclusion of his recalled experience, the death of a young woman seemed to seal off all avenues of recovery from the damage done to...