Mattea Oreskovic Oreskovic 1

Mrs. Ventresca
ENG2D1.5
October 5th, 2023

- captain Torres, the oppressor -

Captain Torres is seen as power-hungry and inhuman due to his lack of human life. In the
story “just lather, that's all” by. Hernando Tellez, the captain, is seen as an evil character because
of the role and power he holds in the military gang that is suppressing the “rebels.” Firstly, the
captain is the leader of a ‘military gang’ that goes and kills innocent people based off their views
just because they’re different compared to his “but we did all right, you know. We got the main
ones, we brought back some dead, and we’ve got some others still alive. But pretty soon they’ll
all be dead” (Tellez 1). This can be seen as proof because the captain was talking to the barber
about what happened when he went on his manhunt with the gang to kill the rebels, sometime
into the service, Torres told the barber to “come to the school today at six o’clock” (Tellez 2).
This can show that the captain is enjoying killing the people. But he also enjoys having power
over the town that he works in, because when he puts the naked bodies on display to use a “firing
squad” (Tellez 2) as target practice to put the people of the town into a state of fear. Secondly,
the barber can be seen as the ‘hero’ in this story because he was having dark thoughts of landing
an “easy kill 'that will be less painful for the captain, but he was also thinking about what would
happen to him if he went through with killing him “how many of us had he ordered shot? How
many of us had he ordered mutilated?” (Tellez 3). This was running through his mind because
the barber was secretly a rebel “it was a secret shared by very few, precisely so that I could
inform the revolutionaries of what Torres was doing in the town and of what he was planning
each time he undertook a rebel-hunting excursion” (Tellez 3). This can be shown as proof on
why the barber is the hero in this story because he was trying his best to not kill the captain in
his chair because if he did, the military gang that the captain was the leader of would go on a
manhunt for anyone that has ever done anything bad to anyone that had the captains views. But a
reason that can also be negative is that the captain will now still hold

Oreskovic 2
power over the town and will leave innocent people scared for their lives. Captain Torres is seen
as an evil man due to his lack of care and human life no matter who it is.