Hyatt Hammad
Short Analysis
One: Bausch’s Peace and Storytelling
In
Bausch’s novel Peace, soldiers
Marson, Asch, and Joyner witness their superior, Glick, kill an unarmed woman.
As the three men travel up a mountain, they remember the incident and retell
the story of her death numerous times. While this storytelling serves to clarify
and/or justify what happened to the woman, it is only useful in hindsight. During
more perilous situations, such as when the soldiers hear Nazis executing Jews
in a nearby village, the storytelling process seems to fail: “Marson…kept
trying to pray. He could not find the words. Each time there was a volley, the
sound of it and what it meant rose up in him, facing at him, a wall against
which his own soul could only collide in unbelief” (120). Religion is one of
the oldest forms of storytelling, and yet Marson is unable to recite the words
that have comforted him in times of need. He and the other soldiers are also
unable to fully comprehend that each shot they hear means the end of another
life. This same inability to understand what is happening occurred while the
woman was murdered as well; Marson told the other soldiers that things happened
“too quickly,” and that by the time he realized what Glick was doing, the woman
was already dead. So in this sense, story telling is only effective in relation
to the past and not in the present when something incomprehensible is taking
place. The novel Peace tells the
story of the soldiers’ dangerous trek up the mountain, allowing readers to
experience some of the struggles (external and internal) that they had to face.
Though there is a limit to storytelling and to just how much suffering that can
be transmitted through the written word--such as readers being able to
empathize, but not able to physically feel the same pain in the moment like the
characters—storytelling is still a necessity for the adequate communication of
human emotions and experiences.
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