Please Shoot Me??

1) "I think everyone subconsciously has thought about what it's like to be shot...To do it in this clinical way, to do something that most people would go out of their way to avoid, to turn around and face the monster and say 'Well, let's find out what it's about,' I think that touches on some cord" (119). In essence, even everyone who was there watching is still going to be asking the same question after Burden went through with being shot aren't they? Because at the end of the day, he is just another one of the soldiers who has had a bullet put in his arm, and the people still have no idea what it is like to be shot. So what I wonder about this quote and how it relates to the whole incident of Shoot is how this in any way answers the question for society and the audience what it's like to be shot? Isn't he the only one that 'finds out'?

2) Ward mentions that as a result of Shoot "we get Burden as heroic victim, as a kind of Martyr, whose self-victimization mimics, in protest, the brutality of the war" (119). Burden classifies in this reading that Shoot could be nothing other than art. But in a sense, couldn't the audience or critics get the feeling that this is almost a mockery of American society of the day? Maybe that is what he is doing, I am not exactly positive. The article talks about how "being shot, at least in America, is as American as applie pie." In that sense, couldn't Burden be seen as portraying that our country has come to accept guns and violence, so making it a form of art is the ultimate way to make it appear beautiful? Does he support his action as art alone, or is it not art at all, but just the protest?