Hello all.
I really don't know who you are but if you are reading this then you are one of a select group of unfortunate souls. I highly doubt that you found your way here on accident and I bet that you will stay here for the duration of my post in order that you do not have to go read someone else's post. It might not be a good reason but it is all I need in order to entrap you for the next while.
As all of you know we were reading the book Fire and Forget: Stories From the Long War. This book is one that I found fascinating for a number of reasons. First of all there is the genre of the book. If I was a librarian it would be one of my nightmares. The book is technically fiction although I believe that it offers enough insight into the author's lives and their feelings that it qualifies as semi-autobiographical. Normally I tend to avoid autobiographies as they drone on and on about the persons lives, focusing on every infinitesimal detail. This book was great in that the stories were focused much more on one extremely defining time of the author's lives. The authors gave us as much detail as necessary but focused on how their story was told to make sure that its message was clear.
The other fascinating thing about Fire and Forget was the war story aspect. When we read war stories we read one of two kinds. The first is where the characters are in the midst of the action and the second is where they are reminiscing on it later but the story focuses on the psyche of the main character. Fire and Forget had the best of both worlds with stories falling in and around both of the categories. Since so many writers collaborated on the project, many styles are included in the book. When the authors talk about war, it seems real and you can practically feel the emotion and adrenaline. The book makes war seem like a real thing. It becomes a discrete series of actions and events in which very sympathetic characters participated. When the authors talk about after the war, I felt that they make it more fascinating as if by showing us the difference between veterans and their family's/surrounding people we can study them. We are at once looking through their eyes and looking through the eyes of a bystander, gaining a deeper connection with the veterans.
Fire and Forget was very interesting. At first I didn't know it was written by multiple authors, so it was interesting to see multiple perspectives and so many different settings. One common theme was that many of the stories were at home. Although the war has ended for them, they have not been able to escape it. The war continues to haunt them in places like American Eagle, and the park. It made me much more aware of what many veterans experience.
ReplyDeleteI also think it was good that Fire and Forget included perspectives from both before and after the war. I think that it really shows how though the soldiers have returned from war, the war never really goes away for them. We often think that if a soldier is back, everything is now fine. After reading Fire and Forget, though, I know it isn't all fine. They still live through the war in their memories in a way. This kind of blurs the line between "war" story and "postwar" story, like we discussed in class. Despite however you want to classify each of the individual stories, though, these stories were really enlightening for me, and now I feel like I understand veterans better.
ReplyDeleteI found your comment on the semi-autobiographical nature of these stories very intriguing. I did not focus on this as much while reading Fire and Forget because the mix of authors and narrative styles obscures this aspect of the stories. I found it much easier to learn about Tim O'Brien through his stories because he did not change the names of himself or his comrades and he wrote an entire book instead of just one story out of a larger collection.
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