I will be rewriting the torture part of Seven Pillars of Wisdom from the perspective of a bystander. The graphic scene is included in Chapter LXXX.
I stood near the wall, pretending to check the lantern, though there was nothing wrong with its flame. The others had already thrown the prisoner across the bench. He was frail—British, I presumed—with the grit he kept pressed between his teeth. His body buckled as they forced his wrists and ankles into place. I worked in these prisons, so I had seen beatings before, but they never made me feel this uneasy. Something about the way he clenched his jaw, as if bracing for pain he expected and almost welcomed, did not sit right with me.
Who is this man?
The corporal came back up the stairs with that Circassian whip he polished like a favorite blade. For a moment I thanked God that I was not on the opposing side. He snapped the lash by the prisoner’s ear. A clear taunt in regards to the impending lashing he was about to receive. The prisoner did not answer. He sharply breathed once and held still.
The first strike left clean streaks, bright and deep like fresh tracks on snow. He faintly counted them, as if insulting the corporal with his consciousness. The corporal grew angrier and the lashings got worse. I would turn away if it did not render me in contempt. His back trembled not only from pain, but from anticipation, a hint at the terror held just beneath the surface.
When he finally slid to the floor in a daze, he looked almost peaceful. As if he had drifted somewhere far away from the beating. I could not understand why this was so difficult for me to watch. Maybe it was the stubbornness he had or the way he remained so still.
Whatever it was, I felt ashamed to be standing there and simply being the bystander.
Rewriting this passage from the perspective of a bystander changed the emotional gravity of the scene. I particularly wanted to emphasize Lawrence’s quietness. In the original text, which is from Lawrence’s perspective, he framed silence as heroic endurance. I wanted to shift the perspective to someone watching these events unfold because I wanted to confront something that maybe Lawrence was not willing to see, which was how brutal, complicated, and practiced that response must have been. I do not want to sound Freudian, but this event of him getting whipped most likely did bring back memories of his mother hitting him. To me and other bystanders, the silence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom was giving old survival strategies that were resurfacing for Lawrence. Also, on the comment of the bystander assuming that Lawrence was British. I got that idea from the Gertrude Bell clip we watched, where she said “exploration is a British thing” or something along those lines. I decided to put my own spin on that.
Wow Amber, you have a wondrous writing ability to encapsulate a truly outsider view. In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence frames that quiet endurance almost as a moral victory, a way of proving his control over himself and the situation. But your bystander shifts the meaning completely. What struck me most was how your narrator can’t figure out why the prisoner’s stillness makes him so uncomfortable. That confusion actually highlights the emotional complexity Lawrence avoids in his own telling. From the outside, his behavior doesn’t read as stoic; it reads as someone who has been conditioned, maybe by past violence, maybe by internal guilt or shame, to respond to pain in a very specific, almost ritualized way. I also found how the detail of the bystander being British really effective as its subtly showed the own fractured patriotism that Lawrence would have with his identity of being British. It’s ironic because it recognizes an part of Lawrence’s identity that he himself is trying to shed away. I really love this post. It’s a eerie yet beautiful way to see how Lawrence wrote his endurance as glory to be a painful coping mechanism if imagined from the outside.
This was great! There’s definitely no reason, I would say, to avoid sounding Freudian here—this is definitely a Freudian moment, and even beyond psychoanalysis, any reasonable person would remember a previous moment of abuse when they are undergoing something similar. I found your narrator’s perception of the British/Lawrence interesting, although it only surfaces briefly—the idea that he would associate Britishness with frailty.
very insightful framing of the incident from an outsider/bystander’s POV. I really also enjoyed Nabiha’s response 9 as well as Claire’s)—you clearly furthered their own engagement with Lawrence esp from a psyschoanalytic reading