Son

Son
We lay aligned, and move to disguise
With a soul below, only the eyes above
Slowly and silently slip away

Sleep now in the soil, the dust in the debris
A stolen smoke ascends, leaving the shell to atrophy
Meet with the earth, as the sober spirit sings

Leave, leave it behind, this truth is harming you
Leave, leave it behind, set out and start anew
Your life hereafter will cure all your troubles and recast a history
Turn and walk away…

🌲🌲🌲

What happens?
Hunter buries the General’s Son, who died in the Battle of the Somme. Simultaneously, he steals the identity of the General’s Son, conspiring to escape the pain of his own life by instead living as the Son.

What’s in a name?
‘Son’ — tells us who this song is in reference to (the son died) and the dynamic this character has with the General (he’s the general’s son; first time you learn this). You know I’ve seen Casey comment that certain information is presented in clear or upfront ways but then it turns out he means things like how you’re meant to infer Hunter’s name from Act I and as I stare at this song I’m realising I have no idea how people figured out the dynamics of the Son and the General without getting it wrong fifty times first.

Whose viewpoint?
(Switches out the dogtags) Sorry guys, Hunter can’t narrate this, he’s down there with the worms.

🌲🌲🌲

>We lay aligned, and move to disguise
THERE we go that’s more like it.

‘We lay aligned’ -> ‘With hands aligned,’ the corpses of the soldiers who died in Go Get Your Gun have been collected and arranged in lines for burial. Hunter is presently in whatever field or building they have arranged for the treatment of these corpses, likely having retrieved some from the battlefield himself.

‘And move to disguise’ -> This could be the living soldiers putting tarps over the corpses of their comrades, while likely also pointing to Hunter’s intentions. Hunter sees the opportunity here to swap his identity with that of the dead Son, since they look extremely alike. He rifles through the Son’s pockets for his postcards, dogtags, ID, etc.

>With a soul below, only the eyes above / Slowly and silently slip away
‘With a soul below’ -> The Son is dead, and it’s his corpse that Hunter is presently standing over.

‘Only the eyes above / slowly and silently slip away’ -> Hunter averts his gaze as if hesitant or guilty, but also as if checking to see nobody else is watching him. Indeed, the processing of the bodies is done and no other soldiers are around now.

I also hear this as Hunter feeling that his own ‘soul’ or ‘self’ is already dead or buried as he locks in to his plan; that is, he regards the person who has died as Hunter, and the body standing over the corpse belongs to an as-yet undefined entity that doesn’t have any compunctions about identity theft.

>Sleep now in the soil, the dust in the debris
Hunter is burying the son’s corpse, simultaneously feeling to be burying himself.

>A stolen smoke ascends, leaving the shell to atrophy
The ‘stolen smoke’ is the Son’s identity or ‘essence’; it ascends in the literal sense of Hunter straightening himself after being hunched over to bury the body, now being resolved to live as the Son or ‘having’ the Son’s essence in him. In the metaphorical sense it’s like, Hunter feels his own soul is solidly ‘below’, right, but the Son’s essence wisps out of the grave and feels to permeate the air before going on to Heaven. Hunter thinks the Son is a better person than him, is kind of in awe of or mystified by him, and thinks it better that the Son survives than Hunter, so on that level too he doesn’t mind trading places.

Leaving the shell to atrophy is the Son’s body being empty of its essence, now, and left to decompose in the grave.

>Meet with the earth, as the sober spirit sings
The burial is completed.

‘Sober spirit’ is of course Hunter’s mood being generally low and grave after This Beautiful Life, but might also be pointing that he’s not putting on a mask of passive joviality as he was in Go Get Your Gun (a drinking song vs. being sober) anymore; these are Hunter’s proper, honest thoughts.

>Leave, leave it behind, this truth is harming you / Leave, leave it behind, set out and start anew
Hunter tells himself to leave behind his old life and assume a new life under the identity of the Son. The way this is framed is like there’s an actual entity he’s talking to (the sober spirit) that is encouraging him to go ahead with this plan. Obviously, it’s just Hunter, but I wonder if he’s justifying it by imagining that the Son would have wanted him to proceed down this path, also.

‘One life for another’, ‘Take another life’ — once again we have Hunter destroying/abandoning his current life to achieve a rebirth. And ONCE AGAIN we have Hunter doing this as his go-to answer to pain. This one is the most severe, though, because it’s not just trying to send his self down an alternate course that might be happier, it’s that he’s given up on himself as being worth anything and thinks the only way to get away from the pain is to literally be a different person.

>Your life hereafter will cure all your troubles and recast a history
Hunter you idiot you’ve done this twice before and both times it didn’t work out. But yeah, he thinks the Son’s life is a significantly more worthwhile, smooth, and happy one to be living than Hunter’s, so he’ll be able to get that stability and comfort he still fundamentally wants as long as he stops being Hunter. He doesn’t want any tie to his (miserable, sad, ‘I’m left with my…’) history anymore.

Note also that Hunter thinks he’s a bad person (’you, with this cruel and bitter heart’, ‘this suffering sends hope to the ground / but I never really had enough’, ‘I can promise you, my ego’s running me’) and seems to recognise a lot of the trouble he gets himself into is a side effect of his own thinking/personality, hence part of why he’d want to replace his usual script with someone else’s.

>Turn and walk away…
Hunter turns and walks away both from the Son’s grave and from his own life.

Go Get Your Gun | Act III | Father