Blog Five- LdT

Flash Fiction is a form of writing that uses minimal words like a short story to express the authors’ ideas in a very brief story. Flash Fiction gives the reader the idea of the story in few words.

Flash Fiction benefits the ideas in Richard Currey’s novel Fatal Light. The stories are so short and end so austerely, however, the stories also go together to form Currey’s point of the novel. The short stories are little snippets from the Vietnam War. However, similarly to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the stories in Currey’s novel are fiction.

Throughout the story there are just flat sentences that are very abrupt and very sudden. Many of times it is said as an unemotional fact. For example even in the first chapter when the narrator is with his grandfather looking at old pictures, he talks with no emotion about how “Tad died in a thresher accident on the farm, left Emma to go to alcohol and finally suicide, the kids spread out to bitter relatives and orphanages, lost to one kind of destitution or another. (Currey, 7-8)” This seems like a pretty emotional story, and yet the reader does not get any information on any emotions.

With such short chapters, every word is extremely important in the message is telling to the reader, in section 4, “Malaria” we see this happen. The sections in “Malaria” are very short, and yet the detail included is incredible. In one chapter it is not even half a page and yet it brings up so many of the common concerns that soldiers had during the War. “Or shoot yourself in the mouth out behind that latrine. (Currey, 94)” Also in this same section he repeats the same phrase twice at the end of the chapter.

In part 13, the second to last chapter in the book, Currey describes the narrators love for Mary Meade. He says: "The truth that we were had its own home in some better time...(Currey,167)"In this book, Currey brings up many of the ideas that the soldiers who fought in Vietnam felt, even though this book is said with minimal words, the ideas are still very clear.