Enchantment and the Criminal Justice System by Deborah Rocheleau

In chapter five of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Billy draws an interesting comparison between an act of vandalism he committed—the crime for which he was forced into the military as punishment—and his “deed on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal” (Fountain 91), one of the most violent acts he performs as a soldier. Early on, we learn that Billy was forced to join the military as punishment for the destruction of his girlfriend’s ex-fiancé’s car. In an under-the-table deal, Billy is offered the military as an alternative to prison, the usual means for reforming violent individuals into upstanding citizens.  

Interestingly, in the military Billy must perform acts much more violent than the crime for which he is punished, most prominently the extremely violent “deed on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal.” However, because of the enchanted way the military and the public view violence performed by soldiers, Billy is applauded for his violent acts as a soldier as much as he is condemned for his violence as a citizen. It seems that the military, rather than reforming his violent tendencies, as prison would, instead only trains them toward more acceptable violence—that is, politically-approved violence.

In chapter five, these two acts come together for Billy in a way which undermines the “reform” he would have experienced in prison. Rather than seeing the vandalism as delinquent and the Al-Asakar Canal deed as heroic, he begins to consider both “the bravest thing he ever did” (91). In enchanting the violence of war, it seems, the military has trained Billy to reconceptualize his vandalism as transformative, a “digression” from the “futility and pointlessness” (91) that was his ordinary, pre-vandalism life. It seems that the “enchantment” of violence can work both ways, enchanting violence on a political scale while at the same time enchanting the personal violence of one citizen against another. In this way, Billy’s time in the military does not reform his violent tendencies toward more politically acceptable expressions of violence, so much as teach him—at least in this chapter—to view all violence as enchanted, regardless of its political acceptability. 

Truely American By Jacob Nolin

Billy finds himself in the company of rich people and feels out of place. They are described by Fountain as such.

"If they aren't quite as flawlessly handsome as models or movie actors, they certainly possess the vitality and style of, say, the people in a Viagra advertisement. Special time with Bravo is just one of the multitude of pleasures available to them, and thinking about it makes Billy somewhat bitter. It's not that he's jealous so much as profoundly terrified. Dread of returning to Iraq equals the direst poverty and that's how he feels right now, poor, like a shabby homeless kid suddenly thrust into the company of millionares" (114).

Here Fountain's words are able to contrast both well- off people and poor individuals. Words like "vitality", "multitude of pleasures", and "company of millionares" put these rich people at the pinnacle of society. Fountain is able to show variety between these rich people in the first line which allows him to make them feel like a varied elite group. These wealthy people could not contrast anymore than with Billy here. Fountain described him as "bitter, terrified, and "like a shabby homelesss kid." This language is straightforward in it's image, but it creates another contrast here that doesn't invole money or class as greatly.

Fountain giving Billy these thoughts shows his internal conflict. He does not see the role of a soldier as heroic or even "American", instead these people are the real Americans, the models and stars and actors who live in a paradise as opposed to the soldier who fights under the flag and is in fear of death every day. Such a contrast is powerful because it shows that even with Billy's status as a soldier he will never be as "American" as these rich people. Instead he will simply be a soldier. This is ironic because war movies depicting American soldiers as herioc are often done using actors and models who are as affluent and well off as the ones that Billy is talking to.

Meanwhile, In Billy’s Head by Abby Booher

Ben Fountain’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” provides an interesting perspective on ideas of war. While the book can look specifically through the eyes of Americans in terms of war, the novel can also describe very broad topics concerning war as well which play off the irony of the American perspectives. One idea in particular is the sensation of fear which rattles around Billy’s head. Fountain writes, “He gets so tired of living with the daily beat-down of it, not just the normal animal fear of pain and death but the uniquely human fear of fear itself like a CD stuck on skip-repeat, an ever-narrowing self-referential loop that may well be a form of madness” (p. 115). Here, the narrator focuses on how simply being afraid of fear that comes from war can be the most terrifying of all. The speaker likens it to a CD which repeats over and over again. This kind of description is not foreign to novels concerning war. Bausch’s “Peace”, for example, provides an insight to this kind of fear when one of the characters reacts to the war with nervous itch. When the sensation of fear rises within this character, he begins to itch furiously on his arm for no reason. The narrator in Fountain’s novel also notes that it is like a “form of madness”. The fear could almost drive the characters to odd behavior or even insanity. It is also interesting to note how the narrator transitions to the next paragraph in the novel, “So these are Billy’s thoughts while he makes small talk about the war” (115). While this might seem to be a minor sentence, the context gives it great meaning. After all of Billy’s horrid thoughts of fear in war, Billy’s mind returns to the present which consists of Americans lightly chatting about the very thing which could drive him mad. This almost flippant tone causes the reader to pause and notice a message the novel is trying to make in how war, through some people’s eyes, lacks weight and a real respect for its cost.

Billy Lynn and the ubiquitous, omnipotent Man

Andrew Hurst

            Near the middle of Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the audience is introduced to the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, Norman Oglesby. He gives a speech before the assembled media. In his speech, he criticizes Saddam Hussein’s government and rule, citing Hussein’s lavish spending at the expense of Iraq’s school system, his personal spending at the expense of Iraq’s healthcare system, his armament spending at the expense of infrastructure, and the corruption and crony politics that ran rampant throughout his government at the expense of the wealth of the people (130). He finishes the speech:

Because what is America for, if not to fight this kind of tyranny, to promote freedom and democracy and give the peoples of the world a chance to determine their own fate? This has always been America’s mission, and it’s what makes us the greatest nation on earth (131).

Obviously, this speech is saturated with irony: America’s faltering public school structure, lack of an easily understood and cheap healthcare system, crumbling infrastructure, and political corruption have been chief criticisms from the American Left and Center for the past decade and a half, if not longer. Through this irony, Fountain wishes to call his readers’ attentions to the blatant double-talk and shallowness of the sort of jingoism that numerous citizens respond to with patriotic fervor.

Moving deeper into Fountain’s message, past the surface irony, he is emphasizing, in this quotation, the ethos of American politicians and the inaction of the general public, especially given Lynn’s reaction, “If there’s a grating artificiality in the performance . . . it’s no worse than any other fixture of the public realm. Billy has noticed that audiences don’t seem to mind anyway” (131). The American public seems content throughout the novel to listen to these types of speeches and parrot buzzwords such as “freedom” or “democracy,” (the pages in which such words fall pell-mell across the book symbolize this phenomenon) so as long as, like Lynn’s own father, their intellects are affirmed: America is the greatest country in the world, America is for fighting tyranny.

Despite the obvious shallowness of these words, Fountain argues that the audience does not care to question them. In the first section of the book, there’s a very Pynchonian section that clues the reader in on the comfort that the public, including even Billy who had previously noted his place as it relates to the system of outside controls (121), feels in being a part of something, a cause, a country. Billy watches the Cowboys’ punter kick a ball, and in watching the parabolic arc, notes the “aspect of surrender, of grateful relinquishment as it yields to gravitational fate” (35) with a sense of tranquility and “relaxation of self-awareness” (36). While Fountain notes the public’s fondness for gullibility, he also mentions Billy’s sense of “intense pleasure” (35) that he gets as the ball reaches the top of its arc, signifying some anticipation at the prospect of breaking out of the fatalist parabolic structure. Perhaps Fountain has hope that politicians and people like Oglesby will no longer have a hold over the public at some point in the future. 

Descriptions of Violence in Oscar Wao

“How she survived, I’ll never know. They beat her like she was a slave. Like she was a dog. Let me pass over the actual violence and report instead on the damage inflicted: her clavicle, chicken-boned; her right humerus, a triple fracture (she would never again have much strength in that arm); five ribs, broken; left kidney, bruised; liver, bruised; right lung, collapsed; front teeth, blown out. About 167 points of damage in total and it was only sheer accident that these mutherfuckers didn’t eggshell her cranium, though her head did swell to elephant-man proportions” (147).

Throughout the novel, the narrator consistently shirks on details of the violence occurring. Readers know vaguely that Beli’s traumatic past left her a physically and emotionally scarred orphan, but thus far in the novel, the only concrete details about Beli’s “Lost Years”  are given from La Inca. She “couldn’t explain what it had meant to find the burnt girl locked in a chicken coop” (128). When Beli is attacked by the Elvises, the narrator skips “over the actual violence” and chooses to “report instead on the damage inflicted” (147). Diaz’s stylistic choice to eliminate detailed descriptions of violence is interesting and different compared to the other novels we’ve read this semester like The Book of Night Women and The Surrendered where James and Lee were more direct about the violence inflicted on their characters.

An interesting reason for Diaz’s lack of violent description could be that the narrator is not a completely omniscient narrator; he only has the information (relayed years later) that others have told him about the characters’ lives and the struggles they face. The narrator doesn’t know the physical experience of what it was like for Beli to be so brutally attacked; he only knows the statistics about her injuries. Because he doesn’t know what the actual experience is like, he is unable to convey or communicate so violent an experience, and is therefore reduced to only video-game-like statistics “167 points of damage” (147) to illustrate the horror of Beli’s experience. 

Beli's Magic

In the Middle of Beli’s story in Bani, the news of her pregnancy excites her “This was it. The magic she’d been waiting for. She placed her hand on her flat stomach and heard the wedding bells loud and clear, saw in her mind’s eye the house that had been promised, that she had dreamed about” (136). At a young age Beli wanted to escape from her life. She didn’t know what she wanted exactly but she was dissatisfied with her dull life at the time. Beli saw a way out in marrying the Gangster with all gifts and promises, so when she heard the news of her pregnancy, it was the magic she needed to save her.

Magic has been present throughout the novel in the form of the bad luck brought on by the Fuku. In this passage however, Diaz uses “magic” as the little bit of luck Beli has been hoping for. This highlights the idea of Beli still being naïve. Up to this point, she seems to believe that if she dreams about something long enough it will happen. She believes all of the Gangsters promises and that he will marry her someday even though everyone else continue to warn her of the dangers in their relationship. In this moment, everything Beli wanted seems to be falling into place. We as readers get to see Beli one last time as the girl she was before a part of her is broken by the oppression of the Trujillo. In the pages that follow, Beli faces the reality that her magic fails to what others call a curse – the Fuku that is the reason she was arrested and beaten. Where this passage is placed in the novel helps readers to see that the Fuku is always present in the lives of these Dominican characters.

Unnoticed Promises: A Passage Analysis by Victoria Carson

In Beli’s main chapter of Junot Diaz’s novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, readers witness a unique “heart-to-heart” moment between Beli and the Gangster. After Beli asks him if he ever misses having a family, the Gangster replies:

“All those people have families, you can tell by their faces, they have families that depend on them and that they depend on, and for some of them this is good, and for some of them this is bad. But it all amounts to the same shit because there isn’t one of them who is free. They can’t do what they want to do or be who they should be. I might have no one in the world, but at least I’m free.” (133-134)

On the surface, Beli accepts this speech. She later tells him she wants to be like him and be free too. But what makes this conversation so interesting is that Beli clearly does not consider the implications of this belief system because if she had considered them she would see the futility of her visions of marriage and children.

Beli doesn’t seem to notice that the freedom that the Gangster claims to own does not match the situation he outwardly appears to be living in, and definitely doesn’t match the future Beli envisions. He says he is free from dependents and people to depend on, that he has “no one in the world,” even though he has a wife, a mistress, and a dictator to please. He does have people in his life, but in order to maintain his freedom, to be who he “should be,” he has distanced himself from them. This freedom that he claims shows how little emotionally invested he is in the lives and futures of those he claims to care about.   

Beli either does not understand or romanticizes this confession of distance, and is blinded to its ramifications for her future. Her excitement about her pregnancy and her belief that the Gangster would be equally excited show how she did not comprehend what the Gangster was saying (even though he basically promises her here they will never have a family) and as such she did not fully adopt his definition of freedom, at least not right away. An argument could be made that Beli’s parenting style might be based on this foundation: the belief that freedom and family are opposing forces.