A young man mourns his friends killed during a revolution. “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” is a song from the musical “Les Miserables” based on the book of the same title by Victor Hugo In the show, one of the characters, Marius, has joined a student revolution to try to improve the quality of life for the poor in France. The revolution is a disaster. School boys prove no match for the French military. Marius is seriously wounded and his friends are killed. When Marius is well enough to be up and around again, he returns to the bar where he and his friends planned the revolution. There, he mourns his losses. As the song continues, Marius realizes that the reasons for fighting that had once seemed so important to him no longer matter. “My friends, my friends! Don’t ask me what your sacrifice was for!” he cries out. Marius’s grief is all the more sharp because all of his friends have died. The death of a lone loved one is hard enough to endure. But to lose several loved ones at once is agonizing. A single, lonely chair symbolizes “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”. Multiple deaths may occur as the result of an accident; an act of war as in Marius’s case; an act of terrorism; or an epidemic. Often, the people who get out alive suffer a condition known as survivor’s guilt. People with survivor’s guilt feel that they somehow did something wrong by staying alive while those around them perished. One of the symptoms of survivor’s guilt is flashbacks. And in “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables,” Marius is clearly flashing back to how he and his friends planned the revolution, hoping to make the world a better place. Realizing that nothing changed in spite of their efforts and the sacrifice of so many lives makes his grief much more difficult to bear.
Songs with Banjo from Harold Hagler
