Blog 9 NR

I’ve concluded that this is a story where the events are all in place, but some details may have been a little exaggerated by the narrator. I did make a note, however, when he mentioned “the tales we inflate for our news from the battlefield” (2). The word inflate caught my eye. Rather than interpret this as him simply saying they lied about what they did, I interpreted it as them exaggerating their progress and their accomplishments in battle. This goes together with the narrator’s intoxication. By aggrandizing details in the story, it appears at first that he’s attempting to further draw in whoever’s listening.

I find it hard to believe that a little girl left camp to go back to her village, deliver food, and return to the camp every night. It then gets more and more difficult to deem possible when they get further and further from that same village. On the flip side, I believe in the narrator’s general story structure: A platoon discovers a young girl after destroying a village and decides to keep her around. She may skip off some nights away from camp to feed her blind grandmother, but I don’t think she would have been able to travel too far. Then, after getting frustrated with her silence, growing concerned about two soldiers gone missing, and growing afraid she may lead the enemy to their camp, she gets blown up. In all the literature we’ve read for this course, such a sequence of events is certainly imaginable.

The long march back to the village along with the discovery of the two soldiers and the old blind woman lead to the realization that the narrator made an incredibly unfortunate mistake. The story then begins to take its form as a sort of apologetic tribute to the mute girl, who turns out to be a haunting figure for the rest of the narrator’s life. We can see this sense of tribute in his comments of her journeys to and from the village, saying that “the tiny child had forged ahead, outdoing herself to return to camp like an adult with an agreement to arrive at an appointment on time” (8). While some details may be exaggerated, they are there to serve the girl some spiritual justice.