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The Inescapable Sorrow of Lost Potential

Why Anakin is not the most tragic ‘Star Wars’ character

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.

― Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Few things are more tragic than knowing you are capable of much but being somehow unable to fulfill your own potential. From becoming ensnared between what is and what could be, while the long years leach away your glamour. From becoming old before your time.

Consider Obi-Wan Kenobi shortly after the collapse of the Jedi and the rise of the Empire, as depicted in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. He is roughly forty years-old, living in self-imposed exile on a planet so bleakly arid that farming moisture is a legitimate way to make a buck. A place so remote that the rest of the galaxy leaves it to the machinations of an enormous slug and his crime syndicate.

Obi-Wan is a young man yet, far too young for retirement, for baking old bones under the hot sun, for shuffleboard and eating supper at three in the afternoon. He is at the height of his powers; if age has worn the fine edge from his vigor, his mastery of the Force more than adequately compensates. He could do great things still, but this is not the place for great things. This is where things dry up and die and are buried by the unrelenting sands. This is a graveyard.

When the highlight of the day is deciding between roasted lizard or grilled womprat, it’s hard not to feel wistful for better days.

He is here to watch over young Luke, the progeny of his old friend. To make sure he grows up straight and true, so that the son can be wielded against the father when the time is right. But that’s not really why he’s hiding out in a baked mud hut on the edge of a great sand sea. He’s here because he failed. He didn’t see what was happening to Anakin in time. And once the horrible truth was known, he couldn’t finish Anakin when he had him beaten. Instead he walked away, trusting to the Force to do what he could not.

The Force, as is its wont, had other ideas in mind.

Obi-Wan’s days are preoccupied with seeing to his most base needs – food, water, shelter – which given Tatooine’s hostile climate, is no sure thing. But such drudgery is beneath his talents. He used to be somebody important, tasked with big, important things. Jedi are not supposed to desire or want; they are meant to take life as it comes and seek the will of the Force in all things. Projecting one’s own desires and trying to control outcomes is what got them into this mess in the first place.

Still, when the highlight of the day is deciding between roasted lizard or grilled womprat, it’s hard not to feel wistful for better days. What’s surprising is how quickly the banality of everyday life sets in, once spontaneity and anticipation are removed from the equation. With nothing to hold his attention in the present, his mind travels to other times and places, remembering and dreading.

By our own standards, Obi-Wan is only halfway through his career. How must it feel to suddenly be put out to pasture, just when you really figured out what you were doing? To have nothing to look forward to other than hunger and thirst and thousands of blinding binary sunsets and that final, awful errand. If the regret and the grief doesn’t eat you alive, the monotony might.

It is little wonder that he turns inward, drawing on the boundless Force. Meditation and prayer is one of the best ways to unburden oneself. And anyway, he has nobody to talk to other than Tusken Raiders, and they mostly shout and shake their gaffi sticks menacingly.

Lost in the Force, time passes.

His hair goes gray. Lines etch his face like the Tatooine cliffs. He stopped carrying his lightsaber, first as a precaution, later because it was unnecessary. It was a painful reminder anyway.

The other he keeps locked away, buried deep under old clothing.

Obi-Wan can feel the time approaching, like a pressure on his back. Soon the Force will reunite him and young Luke, setting them on a path, and perhaps another kind of reunion.

He must not lose the son, as he lost the father.

Anakin is not Star Wars’ most tragic figure because he chose his own fate. Obi-Wan wasn’t a great master – he was rather dickish sometimes – but it is not his fault that Anakin ultimately took his talents to Mustofar’s black sand beaches. He failed Anakin, but the punishment in no way fits the crime. Obi-Wan could’ve done truly wondrous things still, but he spent the apex of his Jedi career watching the galaxy rot, knowing it was within his powers to do something, but unable to leave his final post.

If that isn’t bad enough, recall that he’s on Tatooine to keep an eye on Anakin’s son, so it’s not like he can lose himself in the Force or general drudgery and forget what brought him to this wasteland. The great failure of his life has begot offspring, also sensitive to the Jedi ways, and Obi-Wan’s final penance is to watch from afar and wait and above all, remember. All so that one day the son can be turned loose against his father and do what Obi-Wan could not. How does that not totally screw with his mind? Is it any wonder he’s a little fuzzy with details and specifics once Luke is old enough to ask questions?

Oh, and the reward for a job well done? Being unceremoniously cut down by Darth Vader, little more than bait so that Luke – the real hero – can escape and live to fight another day. All so that Obi-Wan can come back as a Force ghost and listen to Luke bitch about how rough his life is.

Obi-Wan was the greatest Jedi of his generation. He lived out what should’ve been his best years in quiet desperation, baking under unblinking suns, pouring out his life’s blood onto Tatooine’s quenchable sands, slowly ebbing away until only the faintest wisps of his brilliance remained.

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