PAB Blog 5. FATAL LIGHT!

“Fatal Light” by Richard Currey is a work of ‘flash fiction’ that reveals a young man’s experiences with the Vietnam War and the draft. The longest chapters of this work of fiction tend to find their length limits at the fourth page: many chapters barely make it to the second page. While books about war typically lend themselves to lengthy and often gruesome descriptions, “Fatal Light” condenses its images to the bare minimum when it comes to word count.

While reflecting on “Fatal Light” as a piece of flash fiction, it is difficult to not remember the ideas expressed in Time O’Brian’s book “The Things They Carried”. In O’Brian’s novel, a main concept that was thoroughly embellished was that it was impossible to tell a “true” war story. A person can only comprehend his surroundings to a certain limit; especially during wartime. When a soldier tells his story of a firefight or explosion, he may give a very detailed description despite the fact that all his senses truly captured at the time were a flash of light, smell of smoke, and perhaps a loud sound. The way in which “Fatal Light” stays loyal to this reality is what makes it such a convincingly realistic work of fiction.

Because the chapters of this book were so short, word choice was absolutely crucial. Only the details that the main character ‘remembered’ the most clearly were written into the descriptions. For instance, before the main character left for Vietnam, the clanging of ice cubes in the glass of iced tea that his mother was stirring was in full description; yet when he is alone in the middle of the night in a Vietnamese jungle, he shoots a man in the head and gives no description of him, other than what kind of pants he saw on his dead body. A writing style like this does a very effective job at emulating human memory and placing the reader’s imagination in the war.

The choice of making this a piece of “flash fiction” definitely benefits the ideas of the book. When the main character returns home, he visits his grandfather. Although it had only been three years, he noticed a great change in the physical age of his grandfather (he looked more frail and required crutches to walk). It is at this point in the book where it becomes clearer that the writing style of the book can be viewed as a metaphor for a soldier’s life and memory. Life passes by quickly. One only remembers certain details of their life, and soon enough those memories might get pushed aside by new ones. Just as in this book, a boy is at home on page one, and in Vietnam by page 30. Just a soldier’s memory of the war is in short sections, the chapters of this book are short and memorable.