“Madagascar Plum” is the story of a Vietnamese soldier telling a gruesome story about killing a young mute girl. This narrator is in a bar as he tells his story in vivid detail. Before he tells this story, he requests that he has a drink. It seems like the story is tough to tell, so he needs alcohol to ease the pain of this memory and make it easier to retell it.

The alcohol in this story is a very important detail. Before the narrator tells his story he must become drunk, and, as he retells, he was drunk during the story as well. There are three major points that ruin the credibility of this narrator’s story; a drunken man will not tell an accurate story; it is impossible to tell a true and accurate war story; he was drunk while creating this memory of this murder. Because of this constant alcoholism, the narrator’s credibility is very weak. In my opinion, this story might loosely be based on fact, but it is very far from the truth.

While it seems like this story is mostly fiction, it still is very powerful. Clearly an event has happened to the narrator that caused him to increase his alcoholism and shoot off his own leg. This story that he tells is very vivid, which leads me to believe that the narrator embellishes the smaller details that affected him the most. He describes the look on the mute girl’s face before she is blown up in great detail. In reality, even if this event actually happened, the narrator most likely did not observe her face to this extent. This description could be considered one of the fictional elements of the story. These fictional elements are what makes the story so moving.