Its certainly not about any individual suicide bomber, and its not an account of any suicide bomber's experiences - how would Bruce Springsteen know about that?
Its an incredibly emotional song, the kind Springsteen does best. There is a girl involved but it is hard to tell who, the line "i take the schoolbooks from your pack" made me think his daughter, but he then talks of her lips so maybe its his girlfriend or lover.
He is comparing the real and concrete experience of this girl - her humanity, her lips, her hair, her smell, her touch to the abstract, ideological thought of paradise. How could someone give up an experience of paradise on earth, such as love, to try and find the promised paradise which supposedly awaits after death.
At the end of another day (see references to the myth of sysiphus in The Rising) he has a dream (the water is a metaphor for the dream state) about the same girl, in which he and her are together in paradise - but this time, as they are both dead, there is no humanity in her, there is a void in her lips and her eyes are as empty as the paradise they have found. The song ends as he wakes up from the dream ("I break upon the waves") and returns to life with the sun on his face - aren't we in the only paradise we will ever find on planet earth? Can we not see feelings of love and humanity towards and from other people are the closest we will get to heaven. Can we not learn to love each other? Beautiful song, even more so in the wake of the events which inspired it.
Its certainly not about any individual suicide bomber, and its not an account of any suicide bomber's experiences - how would Bruce Springsteen know about that?
Its an incredibly emotional song, the kind Springsteen does best. There is a girl involved but it is hard to tell who, the line "i take the schoolbooks from your pack" made me think his daughter, but he then talks of her lips so maybe its his girlfriend or lover.
He is comparing the real and concrete experience of this girl - her humanity, her lips, her hair, her smell, her touch to the abstract, ideological thought of paradise. How could someone give up an experience of paradise on earth, such as love, to try and find the promised paradise which supposedly awaits after death.
At the end of another day (see references to the myth of sysiphus in The Rising) he has a dream (the water is a metaphor for the dream state) about the same girl, in which he and her are together in paradise - but this time, as they are both dead, there is no humanity in her, there is a void in her lips and her eyes are as empty as the paradise they have found. The song ends as he wakes up from the dream ("I break upon the waves") and returns to life with the sun on his face - aren't we in the only paradise we will ever find on planet earth? Can we not see feelings of love and humanity towards and from other people are the closest we will get to heaven. Can we not learn to love each other? Beautiful song, even more so in the wake of the events which inspired it.