To Report an Incident is Not to Tell a Story

            In Richard Bausch's Peace, shortly before Asch, Joyner, and Marson witness the killing of Jews in a nearby town and some time after the soldiers have discussed the murder they witnessed, Asch informs the others, "I’m reporting it. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not going to go the rest of my life carrying this" - to which Joyner eventually responds, "You might've noticed that two of us got it when she fell out of that cart... she was a Nazi, man" (105-106). I am concerned here with Bausch’s use of the word “report.” It is a military word, and, like other military words in Peace, it fails to grasp the human impact of violence. Asch wishes to see Glick brought to justice for killing the unarmed woman because justice for Glick would create a story with an emotionally satisfying conclusion. The report itself would not be storytelling per se but the recounting of an incident: the soldiers overturned a cart, a Nazi officer and a woman fell out, and after the Nazi killed two American soldiers, Marson killed the officer and Glick killed the unarmed woman. A report lacks characters, plot, and narrative perspective: it is, in Benjamin's terms, information, not storytelling. While at first Asch’s determination to report the incident may read as an urge to tell a story – to confess, to speak forth the incident in order to make sense of what happened – we can view it instead as an urge to create or improve the story. Asch has created a provisional story to the woman’s murder on the road, but most of its characters are bystanders, witnesses to an atrocity; the story ends with some of the men surviving with the knowledge that an unarmed woman was killed for no reason besides Sgt. Glick’s caprice. Unwilling to be cast as bystander to a murder, Asch tries to change the story by pressing the other men to report the incident, which would allow him to tell himself a story that ends with justice for Glick. For Asch, and for Bausch’s Peace, storytelling is not merely a means of absolving or interpreting violence, but a motivation for rectifying violence. Bausch leaves his readers with two choices: rationalize violence, as Joyner does, or try to rectify it. Marson, the perspective character, stands between them, horrified at the woman’s murder but unable to proceed in either direction.