blog 9 TJM

Nguyen thi Minh Ngoc's "Madagascar Plum" is a story of the effect of PTSD as told by an officer in the Saigon Army. The story is told while he is sitting in a cafe, recounting his experiences and his dealings with PTSD. As we get deeper into the story it becomes clear that the narrator is quite unreliable.

His reaction to the plum is the first sign of how this disease has effected him since the war. when he is handed the fruit he freaks out, which is not a common reaction to the offering of fruit. The color of the plum reminds him of the skin tone of the little girl that he had killed. He says "offer me anything but that fruit please, I beg of you"(1). He shows his regret for the actions that he committed but turns around and again shows his indiscretions when he turns to alcohol. I feel that one of the two most prevalent reasons for our mistrust in the narrator is his use of alcohol. The narrator, like many others suffering from PTSD, has turned to alcohol to cure his deep depression and other symptoms of the disease. He tries to leave memories of the war behind as he sinks deeper into the bottle. "The longer I remained inside eating and drinking, the more I lapsed into a stupor and the foggier I became"(6).

The second reason I see him as unreliable is the effect PTSD has had on his mind pertaining to how he allowed his leg to be amputated. His disease allowed for him to will himself to have his leg amputated so that he would be discharged from the Saigon army. The stress that he felt which allowed him to have his leg amputated came from the guilt of killing the little. girl. He felt guilty because after killing the young girl he found out that the girl in fact had absolutely nothing to do with the deaths of his friends in the war.

Throughout the story his constant drinking and the lack of seemingly important details in the stories allow me to believe that this man was unstable and therefore unreliable. Most of this is due to his PTSD which may allow him to block out many of the details and allow him to try and forget so he can attempt to live a normal life, but as we see this has not happened. He is a man struggling with extreme stress issues.