Chapter 13
Pierre is imprisoned with 30 other men, but they all become a faceless mass apart from Karataev, who is Pierre's new model for living. He's an old, round, soldier, who sounds rather like Jackrum (of Monstrous Regiment). Karataev, now he is a prisoner, mostly waxes lyrical about his former life on the farm as a peasant. Pierre attaches a 'moral beauty' to these stories and the folk sayings, which now seem full of wisdom to him. I feel like Pierre, being Russian raised in France, being a bastard son become the heir, doesn't have a strong sense of his identity, so he's looking for other people to tell him what he is or what he should be. Karataev, an ordinary soldier to everyone else, is the "personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth" to Pierre.
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