Overcoming Chaos--Andrew Hurst

Midway through Bausch’s Peace, Marson reflects about the last moments of Walberg and Hopewell, the soldiers who were killed by the German at the beginning of the novel.

“He saw Hopewell talking about Miami . . . ‘Man, just try if you can and think about the music of the shoreline,’ he said, ‘ those waves have been coming in like that for millions of years. Makes you feel small. Makes you see how little you are, how insignificant your problems are (62).’”

The quoted passage speaks to the relationship between storytelling and war. Hopewell, like many characters in Peace, attempts to escape the confusion of war by telling stories about his past; however, unlike the other characters’ stories, which address straightforward narratives about the mundane, Hopewell’s story deals with a subject that is equally incomprehensible and unorganized, in some respects, as war—that is, the human condition and place in the universe. Through the telling of a story with such a lofty and intangible theme, Hopewell seems to challenge the effectiveness of the more focused stories told throughout the novel at bringing comfort to their tellers. Thus, Bausch, by writing both types of storytellers, seems to conclude that storytelling itself is important in the face of conflict, even if it does not give the teller any increased manipulative power over the chaotic elements of his world; through Hopewell, it is argued that it is simply enough to evaluate, and the speaker need not scrutinize or try to offer a definite view of his world.

With this being said, it is interesting to note that on the following page after Marson recounts Hopewell’s death, he mentions that Hopewell only had “the desire to be a storyteller (63)” implying that he perhaps not a storyteller as Marson saw it. Marson, and therefore Bausch, may attribute Hopewell’s death to being someone who sought a place in a larger system, either the universe or war, rather than seeking to overcome such systems through a more focused brand of storytelling. Both conclusions can exist simultaneously together: the catharsis that either brand of storytelling brings to the speaker is equal, but Hopewell’s style results in a soldier who is more prone to succumb to a chaotic or violent system.