The moments he spends watching the firing squad and feels death upon him are the moments of Pierre's turning point in life. Because this is such an important moment, Tolstoy has carefully foreshadowed this death-to-life movement and has provided once more a brief but significant incident to illuminate the qualities of humanity and inhumanity.
Having refused to even give his name, Pierre has no other identity except that of a human being. To have an excuse for killing him, his captors have labeled him as a spy or an incendiary. Pierre realizes himself a victim of an impersonal machinery already set in motion and realizes as well that this trick of dehumanizing a person is the only means whereby an innocent individual can be executed. When Pierre and Davoust look at each other in the face, this impersonalizing machinery is reversed and Pierre becomes an individual with the right to live. As his fellow"incendiaries" are methodically fired upon, Pierre feels himself dead. His soul has been"killed" from an intense awareness of the facility with which individual human beings become impersonal objects of execution. Tolstoy must now bring his hero back to life.
The scene of rebirth is as symbolically rich as the scene of dying. The darkened shed that imprisons Pierre is like a womb. Karataev, endowed with feminine sympathy, is his midwife and he offers Pierre some simple food (potatoes) for his first nourishment. Karataev's"roundness," itself suggestive of the womb, is like the wheel of life in which every human soul is part of God and the spirit of God part of each soul. As a living symbol of life's unity and universal love, Karataev is the means for Pierre's renewal.
