Diversion and Disconnect in Bausch’s Peace: by Christina Weir Thorpe

In Richard Bausch’s Peace, Corporal Robert Marson and his fellow American soldiers look to storytelling as a way to divert their attention from the cold reality of war. Political rumors neither clarified nor substantiated the soldiers’ purpose in the war and the retelling of them produced additional rumors of corporeal punishment.  Therefore,

“All you could do when it came time to talk, then, was talk about home.  Because home, really, meant everything else, everything that wasn’t war: women, buddies, sports, jokes, music, children, food, drinks, cars, parents, school, houses.  Home.  But it hurt to talk about home” (57).  

Here Bausch suggests that storytelling enable the soldiers to circumvent the uncertainties of war.  Speaking of things categorized as “not war” granted the soldiers deniability of present circumstances.  However, in retelling anecdotes of pre-war existence, a deeper effect of storytelling arises.  Bausch suggests soldiers not only use storytelling as a diversion, but as a disconnect from the present atrocities. The soldiers then find themselves conflicted with the need to disconnect and the possibility that the “home” they talk about may not be a future reality for them. 

For Marson, in particular, this incongruous aspect in storytelling becomes problematic with the lethal demands he encounters.  How can he recount “everything that wasn’t war” as he shoots the enemy at close range or sights a sniper in his crosshairs? Toward the end of the novel, Bausch exposes this conflict as Marson is unable, then unwilling to recount his memories of home.  In the reality that was war Marson “did not want to think of home, or love, or of family, hearth, hope or a sleep that presumed that what you left for a province of dreams would be there when you got back” (156).  It appears for some, the storytelling that was once a diversion becomes a painful reminder of reality.