"WHO AM I?
You are Erekose, the Eternal Champion.
WHAT IS MY REAL NAME?
Whatever it happens to be.
WHY AM I AS I AM?
Because that is what you have always been.
WHAT IS ALWAYS?
Always.
WILL I EVER KNOW PEACE?
You will sometimes know peace.
FOR HOW LONG?
For a while.
WHERE DID I COME FROM?
You have always been.
WHERE WILL I GO?
Where you must.
FOR WHAT PURPOSE?
To fight.
FOR WHAT?
Fight.
FOR WHAT?"
The passage above was taken from Michael Moorcock's The Eternal Champion. The above passage seems simple at first glance, and this plain style carries on throughout the book. However, much more complex themes can be gleaned from this excerpt once the context of the passage is considered. The Eternal Champion is the first book of a very loosely linked series of books. Most of the books have different main characters, points of view, milieu, and themes. The only link is the identity of the champion as a savior/hero of mankind. Reincarnation is a unifying concept. The character is the always vehicle by which the author states his beliefs about the nature of the human race. The Eternal Champion is written in first person.
The plot itself is fairly simple -- about the Eternal Champion's (Erekose in this volume) struggle against first an alien and then the human race; and more directly - about Erekose's struggle with himself and his morality. The sentence structure and vocabulary are plain, but because of some of the concepts presented in the book, there are necessarily some more complicated sentence structures and vocabulary. The preceding passage is typical of an interlude between chapters. It is a (dream?) conversation between the main character and an unnamed entity, perhaps another facet of himself. This allows the author to more fully examine the character's thoughts in ways that are not possible in the course of the plot.
There are several themes demonstrated in this passage (when read as part of the overall plot). The first involves the character's use not as an individual, but as a representative for mankind. This is shown in the passage by the rather ambiguous answers given after the initial "You are Erekose".(This answer serves to switch from pure first person to a more detached perspective). The plot of the book involves the main character's (the Eternal Champion) destruction of the human race because of its love for war. Humans will unite only to fight a larger threat. Once that threat is gone, humans will quickly fall to fighting amongst themselves. Humans fight as one empire in this book, but only because of the supposed threat of a demon \ alien empire. The second part of this theme is humanity's tendencies toward prejudices. If man cannot understand something, it should be feared, and if it is feared it will ultimately be destroyed. The demons in this book are portrayed as evil from the beginning, but near the climax and conclusion it is revealed they have no capacity for "evil" emotions, such as hate. This brings me to a third aspect of this theme -- the absurd justifications that societies have used for war and hatred. Various political leaders throughout history have tried to justify their actions -- Hitler, Stalin, etc.-and their peoples have believed these justifications. Humans are willing to accept a lie if it will make their own actions justified. This trait leads humans to destruction at the end of the book because of their unwillingness to accept responsibility for their actions. All the parts of this theme are tied together by the author's belief that human behavior cannot and will not change. Peace is a noble ideal, but one that in the author's point of view will never be achieved. The human race by its nature cannot be permanently peaceful, and humans sow discord even in their efforts to bring about peace.
The second theme that can be gleaned from the passage above is that we have responsibilities that cannot be changed. They do not go away if we ignore them or fool ourselves into believing that something else would be better. In the passage above this is demonstrated by the repetition of the last answer, "Fight", several times. Even if we do not suffer for shirking our responsibilities, someone will. Erekose (the temporary name for the main character) first ignores what the human race does to the demons and later attempts to justify it by saying if they don't win, the demons will. In the end, he is forced to choose the demon race over the human. This shows the most important part of this theme -- loyalties to others, no matter how strongly held, cannot justify a person's betrayal of the responsibility he has to himself and to everything that exists around him.
The third theme is that people can be judged only by their actions, not by what they say or what their motivations are. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is a common saying expressing this theme. In The Eternal Champion this theme recurs several times. The first, and most obvious is in direct conversation. A relatively minor character states to Erekose that beings can only be judged by their actions, referring to the alien slaughter of humans. Later, the main character falls victim to this rule, agreeing to a war of genocide against the demons because of love. This trait and theme is, in the end, what dooms the human race. The main character kills his entire race not for revenge or because every one was evil, but because their past and probable future acts of war had deemed his actions necessary. This book did have several important things to say, despite appearing simplistic at first glance. The passage ably demonstrates the author's style and gives clues to the underlying themes in the book as a whole.