Transformation of Memory in Bausch's Peace: by Sarah Britsch

The first time Marson is alone in Richard Bausch’s Peace is when he is keeping the night watch for the others.  Alone in darkness and freezing rain, Marson thinks back to the incident from the night before:

 He replayed the scene in his mind – the shapes in the muddy straw, as if the two people were made out of it, emerging from it in a stream of epithets, the shots from the black Luger, Hopewell and Walberg falling, and his own shot, knocking the man over, the pale German with his bright red hair and his green eyes.  It was all out of the real of time in some way, and then time slowed while the Kraut died, and the woman kept shrieking, and Marson could not take his gaze away from the look of wonder in the dying man’s eyes, until he heard the last shot, and turned to see the woman fall over, the legs coming up in that clownish inertia and thwacking back down in the mud.  61-62

 

The scene is starting to transform for him and, in some places, degrade.  It is clear that, at the very least, the memory is beginning to take on a life of its own through the words, “It was all out of the realm of time in some way.”  He remembers feeling like the moment lasted forever, like he is still there because the picture is always floating in front of him.  It is an event that Marson never left, that is still happening as though time never moved on.

Degredation is evident right away when he says that the people seemed to have been made out of the muddy straw.  His mind is overlapping details, combining them.  He still has the events in the right order, but his memory is starting to blur some details and heighten others.  For Marson, it is not the woman who bothered him – which is the part everyone else seems to have the most trouble with – but the man he shot himself.  The only part of this memory that Marson gives detail to is the Kraut.  He is the only one in the memory with color and expression, and it is with his death that the memory slows time.  The moment the Kraut died – with his red hair and wonder-filled eyes while the air is pierced by echoing screams behind him – is the moment that Marson can’t escape and replays and tries to make sense of.  The detail indicates that Marson was struggling to see the Kraut as an enemy and was instead seeing him as another man who had just died at his hand.  For this reason, the moment transcends time.