Blog 9 FY

The Madagascar Plum is a poignant fictional story written by Nguyen thi Minh Ngoc. The story is narrated by a former officer in the South Vietnamese army. The actual setting of the story is in a bar where the narrator is presumably drinking and getting more and more drunk. After being shown a Madagascar Plum he recounts his memories from the war about a child his unit finds. They wrongly say the child participated in the absence of some of their comrades and murder the girl. This story that is told also focus on the officers alcoholism and PTSD problems after the war.

In my opinion the narrator is not reliable and its hard to take everything he says for fact. Firstly I think this because in the beginning of the story, after they entered the destroyed village, the unit commander says that they often faked reports to the Americans that overstated their efforts. Presumably they did this to make it look like their unit was more productive than it actually was and receive the favor of the Americans. This passage was in the story for a reason and my take is that it can be used as a warning that some aspects of the story might not be completely accurate. It says that in many of their reports they inflate their ventures on the battlefield. It is very possible that some aspects of the story were "inflated".

Also it is hard to believe the narrator is reliable because he is clearly an alcoholic. The entire story is told in a bar where he is probably quite drunk already. This means that thus entire story can just be a drunk war veterans ramblings. Also the narrator is drunk when he accuses the girl of her false crime. If he was of a right mind he may not have decided to do things the way that he did, and he admits this in the text. It seems like he drank a lot of whiskey and wine during the cold and rainy night and its highly plausible that parts of his memory are inaccurate and biased due to the alcohol. Essentially what we are reading is a drunk retelling of a hazy drunk memory so its most likely not 100% accurate.

Finally I find the narrator unreliable because he suffers from PTSD. We all know that PTSD messes with a persons mind and obscures reality. Not only did the narrator somehow injure his leg on purpose to leave the war, but he also beat his child near death because he squished a Madagascar Plum. Clearly the author is not completely of a right mind. I think this story can be interpreted with a grain of salt because the author has many qualities that would make a person mistrustful of his story.