MGB Blog 9

I think that the narrator is a reliable source for his story. It is apparent that he suffers from PTSD by the way he reacts to the Madagascar plum in the café. His reaction shows again, how Vietnamese soldiers were also negatively affected by the war and had their own share of gruesome memories. His memory of the girl is reliable because his PTSD helps him to recount the memory in horrid imagery. He is reliable according the truth of war stories. The truth and reliability in the logical sense does not apply to war memories.

Even though the narrator drinks and sees hallucinations, his memory of the mute girl is not discredited. The cook found the girl and reluctantly handed her over to the narrator who thought it “would be better to have found a dog than a child”. I think he says this because he feels guilt to what he knows comes with finding an enemy. Even though she is a child, the narrator must treat her as a threat. But it seems as though the narrator sympathizes with the child as he describes her with vivid description.

He “can vaguely remember her huge eyes like two sparkling bowls in an oval face that was as coal black as a thin rice cake with its sugar blackened”. This dark description shows even though he pitied her, he was also intimidated by her. Such details are meant to represent the reliability of his story. No man would willingly kill a child himself and then not be haunted by the memories. Even if he watched another person do what he said he did, he is reliable. The truth comes not from the linear statements of facts but from the meaning to which the author is affected by.

The child is compared to a ghost because of her disappearances. It is because of he ghost like behavior and odd refusal to talk that the narrator lets his intimidation overtake his action to kill her. He, “couldn’t allow this tiny child to play a continual trick”. So he strapped her with explosives and watched her die around him. When the reason behind her disappearances is discovered, the narrator realizes his mistake. She was no threat, she was just a mute girl trying to steal food for her starving family during the desolate time of war. And because he is guilty, “the memory is printed on my (his) mind as a Madagascar plum”

Because he is viewed as a reliable source, the story is interpreted as an actual occurrence that could have caused his PTSD. The impact of killing innocent civilians in war is the truth when the narrator is viewed as a reliable source.