He saw people as puppets, controlled by some pitiless force much as he, in boyhood, had controlled his own marionettes in his toy theatre, making Mr Punch jibber and squawk in nonsense-language.
He was going to die like Cedric, those pitiless red eyes were telling him so...he was going to die, and there was nothing he could do about it...but he wasn't going to play along.
It features one of literature's most pitiless and vibrant depictions of vice, in the form of a quasi-mythical character, fat and hairless, who becomes the novel's amoral centre.
Lying in the pitiless sun, shoulder to shoulder, head to feet, were hundreds of wounded men, lining the tracks, the sidewalks, stretched out in endless rows under the car shed.
They are princes, because it would be imprudent to enlarge their power; the ambitious, whose pitiless genius must not be armed, and the debauchees, who would find in hidden sciences the means to satiate their evil passions.
So Nixon and Kissinger wage this pitiless war against Cambodia that then leads, as we know, to the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the killing fields, and all the other horrors associated with the war.
Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean
I call to witness the mysteries of the universe I questioned in the speech of birds, and you, Thimbrian, never before so pitiless to my supplication what presagings of the future I endured.