I’ve changed things around a bit from the schedule and from what I announced in class. Pay attention:
For Monday, Sep 25
Read “The Big Cat,” by Louise Erdrich in The Best American Short Stories 2015. There is no reading response to complete for this story.
For Thursday, Sep 28
Read “The Fugue,” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway in The Best American Short Stories 2015. Complete the following reading response (due Sep. 28). Respond to the prompt below in a 200-300-word response.
Slight warning: This probably the most challenging story we’ve read this semester. It’s the longest (20 pages) and the subject matter is a bit difficult. I’m sure you can handle it just fine but I’d probably say don’t read it right before going to bed at night.
Reading response prompt:
- What effect does the structure of this piece have on your experience of reading it? In other words, how does the layering of different memories make you feel and react as a reader?
- In your response, cite one or two passages that you found particularly “fiery,” and that help you explain your answer. Discuss these excerpts in detail.
To respond, click on “leave a reply” (written below). You’ll have to sign in with your WordPress account (or enter your name and email). Write your response. Please write your full name at the bottom of your response so I can identify you. Click on “post comment.” You will not see your comment. You’ll likely get a message saying something like: “Your comment is being held for moderation.” Please post it only once. Do not email me asking if it posted.
Copy and paste your response onto a Word document and save a copy for yourself, just in case. You don’t need to print it and bring it to class. In case of any technical issue, you can hand in the hard copy at a later date. In terms of technical issues, benefit of the doubt will always go to the student.
Contemporary American Fiction 
The structure of this piece is reflective of the protagonist’s character in the sense that it is disordered, often interrupted and frequently shifts between the past and the present. The non-chronological order in which the events take place adds to the confusion of the story as it’s difficult to differentiate between the past and the present. This compliments the story’s theme of the perception of reality.
Although I did not understand this story to its entirety, I felt as though I was completely captivated in my reading. The distinct structure allowed for the readers to gain a better understanding of what goes on in someone’s mind when suffering from epilepsy and later PTSD. They have no concept of time and are severely scarred from their experiences, resulting in a huge distortion: “He will be honest in his report, but in his honesty he will be no more able to separate what actually happened, for the most part, from the false implantation of memory, of narrative memory, which was coeval with this experience itself” (Hemenway 19). The order in which the events are told accurately represent the haziness of Wild Turkey’s memory. Even when Wild Turkey is describing the present, his thoughts are all over the place as he is truly living in the moment, where many observations and thoughts occur at once.
Wild Turkey is exposed to many stimulations in which he approaches the idea of combat in a dehumanized manner. In a moment of such intensity, he remains calm and lets his mind wander, questioning whether it will finally seem real in the true situation. He goes on about the fake role that the Iraqi villagers play in these stimulations and analyzes the idea of putting on a different front for the same identity. Wild Turkey also expresses an intriguing idea of people’s tendency to adjust their authenticity to better fit a particular situation: “the team’s utilitarian military patois always morphing what they said just enough to approximate some slightly more surreal world, a language somehow better suited to the world they are actually confronted with” (7). These perplexities are emphasized by the disorder and haziness in which the story is told.
There were many details throughout the story that I struggle to find the meaning behind. Is there a deeper, sexual meaning behind the scent he describes or is it to simply help link certain events together? What are Wild Turkey’s brother’s true thoughts about him and does his wife heavily influence them? Is Wild Turkey jealous of his brother in any way?
Emily Sarid
(different page numbers due to an online version of the story)
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It’s a confusing read, to be sure, but you’ve managed to hone in on some recurring patterns. Questions at the end are very productive.
Plus.
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Personally, due to the manner in which the story was structured, I absolutely hated “The Fugue” and would not ever want to read it ever again. The reason for why I say this is because it is almost impossible to fully understanding what is actually going on. The story has a horrible habit on not letting the readers know if a paragraph is talking about a past experience from Wild Turkey’s (the main character’s life) or if it is explaining what is currently happening as, from what I understand, it takes place in many different time periods of the character’s life. The settings of the scenes are also very randomly added. At one point, he is in the in the middle of Iraq and then Wild Turkey will be in a totally different setting and time. It is as if the author wrote a whole bunch of paragraphs and decided to place them in any order. And, because of this, we learn the names of characters that do not or barely have an explanation as to who they are. For example, the story talks about how he will join a military group and will have to go through a sort discipline training as a part of his initiation, but (in the next paragraph) the scene switches instantly without explanation and a girl is talked about:
“Later, he will not tell the marine recruiters or doctors about the fits but will have one anyway on the first night if initiation, before he even gets to boot camp proper. […] recruits being kept awake all night, forced to keep their hands flat out in front of them, hovering four inches above the table.
Wild Turkey wakes up, but Jeannie has already left the bed. Wild Turkey can see her, if he hangs off the side of the mattress, down the narrow hallway: the bathroom door ajar, the bathroom light golden and warm in the cool, cesious fall morning (103).”
But I believe that there is a specific reason for why the structure is so disorganized. The reason why I chose this quotes as an example of a fire moment because I believe that gives us a very tiny hint as too why it is written the way it is. It is mentioned a few times (even in the quote) that he has these fits and it even mentions the word “depression” a few times here and there. It is also mentioned how he was in Iraq and perhaps a damaging mental condition from the trauma of the war. My question is: Due to his fits, could this be a condition that brings him into states of confusion and, therefore, this is the why the story is structured very oddly? Either way, it still makes it very tedious and annoying to read.
-Justin Aquino
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I appreciate the candidness of your response.
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Because the story is composed of a chain of flashbacks and memories, it makes it hard to follow and difficult to distinguish Wild Turkey’s past from his present. Wild Turkey is a character who has lived through a lot and it shows in the way that every thought he has reminds him of a past event in his life. Although this may be good for the reader in understanding his character better, it makes it difficult to understand the story and identify a clear timeline. For instance, we see this when all of Wild Turkey’s memories collide: “Already they are clear of Ramadi’s outskirts and jogging into the field where the helicopter will briefly land and collect them; already they are back at the operations base, going to sleep; already Wild Turkey is waking in mid-fuck with Jeannie; waking in the invigorated air of Merry’s room after a punch; already he is waking to the town’s lights buzzing with the edge of his pills” (120). Since this quote comes from the last page of the story, we have already been introduced to the events he references, but we cannot make the clear connection between them all as he does.
Because Wild Turkey also suffers from epilepsy as well as his Posttraumatic stress disorder, it adds another layer of confusion to the reader as his realities get mixed up even more. He does not have a clear train of thought nor a good perception of time. A fiery moment in the story which reveals this to the reader is when Wild Turkey is looking at Jeannie as she is getting ready in the bathroom and she “stands in front of the mirror quietly, getting ready for class or work, he can’t remember which she has today. He’s been home from his deployment for two weeks now and he still can’t get ahold of time. In the afternoons he gets in the shower, wastes no minutes, gets out to find it’s two hours later” (103). His life has become a blur and he has trouble differentiating what is real from what is fake, which transmits the same struggle to the reader.
Charlotte Vézina-Dufresne
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An excellent reading of this very challenging story.
Plus.
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Throughout reading this story, I felt very confused as to what was actually going on in the main character’s life because every memory of Wild Turkey was from a different time in his life. Life is made up of memories and despite how confusing this story was, I understood that memories don’t have to follow a certain order. Every memory is precious and there’s nothing more to it.
“It will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing” (103).
This was a very powerful statement because it offered so much clarity in the jumble of all these memories. Wild Turkey has fits. He takes medicine for these fits and then every experience of having a fit or taking medicine becomes an old and new memory because Wild Turkey knows that his life is essentially a series of memories all wrapped up into one.
“He wakes outside the courthouse with Jeannnie even though his heart’s not really in it; he wakes in his second tour in Iraq, on a pile of rubble in Fallujah, the roar of heavy metal being pumped at the insurgents a toneless room of sound all round him…” (120). Every morning Wild Turkey wakes up and reminisces on a different memory. Life goes on and each day is a new memory, therefore every morning is a different morning from all the other mornings you wake up from.
Morgan Kane
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I understand that this is a difficult story, but you haven’t sufficiently demonstrated that you’ve read it.
Minus.
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As I was reading this story I was really hoping the layers wouldn’t wrap up in some logical way. This may seem a bit odd but I love the fact that there are so many ways to interpret what all these layers are. And in those different understandings, there are just as many different stories. After I finished reading the story changed a couple times for me. One way of seeing it is it’s just a collection of stories from Wild Turkeys life (perhaps just a dream). I think that’s boring. During the story, Wild Turkey talks about Tow Head when they are shooting: “[Tow Head] will use the replica rifle to shoot himself through his cheekbone” (117). To me, this shows the possibility of PTSD which we can pass on to Wild Turkey possible having it. Then we can see the story as a linear progression of a man’s perspective dealing with PTSD. This could also be the case but with drugs instead of PTSD as they are also referenced quite often in the story. As interesting as that is I landed on a different final theory. I think that where he woke up the first time is his real place in the story and for the first time in a while, there is nothing interfering with him (no drugs, no PTSD). And in this sober state, all these memories come back to him and he is reliving them all for the second time. He feels like he is waking up again and again in these situations as these memories previously blocked, come back to him in a flood. That flood ties into why the layering is also very good, it throws you right into the action. This is very simple but has a profound effect on the story where it seems like it’s racing forward somewhat out of control. The line “Wild Turkey wakes up” gets used constantly throughout the text, and you learn to get ready for something new and exciting when you see it. But, when there is a slight deviation from the norm it lights a fire for what comes next: “Wild Turkey jars awake” (117). It’s a very slight difference but this time you are ready for a truly exciting/ intense layer to the story. The fact that just a start to one of the layers can get you so excited is a testament to how a story full of layers can work so tremendously.
Jeffrey Smith
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Very cool reading of this story. Glad you liked it.
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I didn’t understand what was going on during most of the story, especially when suddenly the narrator would have a flashback, and then suddenly he’d be back in the present, and then have another flashback but one that was not as far back as the one he had just before… or was it, I don’t know. But by the end of the story I realized that his thoughts, his jumbled, disorganized thoughts, were a product of his epilepsy and PTSD, and suddenly the quick switches from past to present made me feel like the story was real. For 20 pages I was able to catch a glimpse into the mind of a man seriously affected and damaged by war. This wasn’t your typical war story, some of his thoughts pertained to what he experienced in Iraq, some did not. And that’s the reality of how a person thinks. Do you really think if we were to somehow be able to hear the thoughts of a man with PTSD in real life we would understand exactly what is going on? Definitely not. For example, after reading the first few pages, I was extremely discouraged from continuing, because I had no idea what the meaning was behind anything he was thinking about. I knew before I started reading it that the story was about war, so then why is he thinking about seemingly random things? But after reading the last few pages I was able to (for the most part) piece together why he was thinking about the smell of his second-grade teacher, “specifically of the rank, slightly fetid scent that would occasionally waft subtly from somewhere inside her gingham dress on a tendril of air in the last few weeks of school before summer” (101). First of all the way the author described this memory really grossed me out, but it’s this particular scent that triggers memories from Iraq, specifically when they’re dragging a dead teenage girl’s body outside to burn. “And does Wild Turkey smell, cut by the fumes of the kerosene, that rank fetid waft from the girl’s bed sheets” (119)? You see, it’s not always going to be a loud gun-like noise that triggers memories from the war like we see in movies. In a movie, a man will hear fireworks and freak out, but this story was based on real life, and I don’t really understand it because I don’t have PTSD.
Maggie Sessenwein
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Interesting reading. You’ve made a really interesting connection between the two moments in the story that you highlight.
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I initially thought that this was going to be a story about a homeless man who has some kind of mental disorder. It kept mentioning “his fits” or “his gyres in time”, that would set his mind back to a random memory. I wasn’t surprised to find out that Wild Turkey had been a war veteran, it all clicked with the mention of marine recruiters and boot camp. Wild Turkey was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. In the story it’s said that Wild Turkey is real confused with time, he can’t keep up with the passing of time and seems to get lost between where he is in one moment and where his head takes him to next. I think that regardless of if the story was enjoyable or not, the author did a really good job at projecting this not-so-firm grasp of time through all Wild Turkey’s flashbacks. We, the readers, did not know which time period he was in or where he was, just like Wild Turkey himself. It was real insightful. The author seemed to want to make this story feel overwhelming because living in various time periods in your head is overwhelming. I felt confused and distracted because that was how it was written, how it was meant to be read. Through his flashbacks, his fits, I got bits and pieces of what his life was like before, during and after the war. One moment of fire was when Wild Turkey was talking about the fake villages put together for him and his team, and he wondered how frustrating it would be, to expect people to break into your house and still be scared. Wild Turkey himself felt, “that flush of stupid anger at [the teenage girl] for not somehow knowing what would happen” when he looked down at her “partially collapsed head” (113). This was when I realized that even while Wild Turkey was training and tracking with his team, his view of what was real or not even then was blurred. The fake villagers showing real fear, “a real video of a real execution” that was said to have been fake, and the fake funeral for a real person who had been killed. I would also like to bring up the ending because I thought it was great. It just shows how Wild Turkey’s situation isn’t something he can easily get rid of. His situation, much like the ending, is messy and repetitive.
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This is a really intelligent and well-written response to this story.
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Hemenway’s The Fugue was written in a very disorganized way, which caused the readers to be disoriented and added a lot of confusion when it came to arrange the events chronologically. I caught myself re-reading some passages, sometimes even the whole page, because of the author’s style. I believe that the author purposely left out many important details or explanations and organised these events in such way to reflect and further emphasise Wild Turkey’s state of mind. Suffering from PTSD and epilepsy, Wild Turkey has trouble organizing his thoughts and connecting the dots chronologically. The notion of time is unclear in his mind and he is therefore unable to differentiate reality from past memories. Readers are introduced to events from different time periods, leaping from past to present, to the near present, back to the past, and this back-and-forth occurs throughout the story. It is hard to understand whether the events described actually occurred or not. Wild Turkey admits himself that reality is a concept that he is quite uncertain of: “It will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing” (103). I found this passage to be “fiery” because this statement allows us to assume that not all the events might have taken place. This means that the truth presented by Wild Turkey in unreliable and this changes the story in its entirety. I feel like this detail creates a completely different perspective for the readers. May it be possible that the death of the teenage girl from the ‘real’ village turned out to simply be a simulation? A simple arrangement of chairs is enough to trigger Wild Turkey’s confusion: “These same chairs, in this very same formation, were used in the fake/real base near the fake village in Arizona, in the fake (real?) chapel area for the fake/simulated funeral service that they were all required to attend during the exercise” (115). The author’s style, as complicated and draining as it may be, most definitely adds a kick to the story and allows for the readers to raise many doubts.
Andy Nhieu
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You do an excellent job of making sense of the confusion in this story.
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The layering of the memories proves how disoriented and mixed up a soldier’s life can become. The arrangement of the story makes me sad and puts me in perspective of how hard it must be having that position, and coming back from war. I cannot even try to imagine how difficult it is. This story gives us an outlook of their lifestyle, their struggles, their lack of emotion, confusion, and loss of sense of time. While reading it I felt very down and depressed because this is reality, and soldiers go through this every single day, while we’re oblivious towards it. One of the most particular passages that got to me was when the narrator describes Tow Head’s experience in deployment. “…he suffered an undiagnosed TBI at some forgotten point during his deployment, will use the replica rifle to shoot himself through his cheekbone, perhaps purposefully…” (117). This part is extremely intense because the narrator is describing it in a calm way, and this just proves that this sort of thing isn’t irregular for deployed soldiers. It’s impossible to imagine to what point their lives get unbearable, by the situation they’re put in. They suffer from indescribable illnesses, which leads them to take their own lives. Another passage that’s very strong is when Wild Turkey repeats “Jeanie in a Bottle!” more than 40 times, “… on and on until the sound became extenuated, then lost all tone, then resolved briefly into song before crumbling into over-articulation, each alien phoneme distinct and meaningless”. This passage isn’t about the sound, it is deeper than that. It is describing this soldier’s everyday life, in repetition which becomes exhausting, and intolerable and to a certain extent, meaningless. Throughout their journey, they have highs and lows, but at the end of the day they feel exasperated.
-Nareh Sarkissian
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Very cool reading of the repetition in the story.
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The story’s use of overlapping memories works with Wild Turkey’s character as we learn more about how his mind has been warped over the years from seizures, drugs and PTSD from his time as a soldier. The way the scenes are presented is realistic because humans naturally have a complex web of interconnected memories. One memory could be triggered by a something small, which could then unlock related events, eventually creating a chain of memories from random points in time, without a beginning or an end.
By looking into his memories, we learn a lot about Wild Turkey’s relationships and the importance that others have to him, which reveals more about his character. Wild Turkey witnesses his friend Tow Head fulfill his dream of owning his favorite rifle, which Wild Turkey helped make possible: “Tow Head reaches the area of bloodied snow where he has expertly dropped what must be at least ten birds and Wild Turkey can see him…dancing and laughing wildly, the sound rising and rising in joy, and Wild Turkey, watching, loves him, loves him, loves him” (162). The repetition of Wild Turkey thinking he “loves him, loves him, loves him” shows how much of an impact Tow Head had on him. He feels proud to have brought so much joy to someone else’s life, rather than feeling like a burden, as he is to his brother. It is also said in the present, so that even though the moment has passed, he still feels his love for Tow Head, as though he is so alive and real in Wild Turkey’s mind that he cannot let the only part of him still living slip away. Wild Turkey repeating his words over and over in certain scenes (“loves him, loves him, loves him”) also mimics the way his mind brings back certain events in his life so that he may relive them over and over. This hints at Wild Turkey’s PTSD; from experiencing traumatic events, his mind has become a broken record that cannot let any memories go.
When Tow Head’s suicide is revealed, the weight of his death following the heart filled scene reminds us that all these happy memories are looked at in hindsight, and that the best moments of Wild Turkey’s life have long since passed. The reader can feel the impact of his death on Wild Turkey, made even more gruesome because he used the same gun that once brought him so much joy to then kill himself. We can assume that Wild Turkey feels guilty for giving him the gun that ended his life, as well as never considering Tow Head’s belief that he had a TBI, which may have also led to his death. The use of memories to show these scenes one after another is much more shocking and painful than showing them in the present.
Kaela-Rose LeBlanc
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Great comments on connection between repetition and emotion in this story.
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I really didn’t enjoy the “The Fugue”, I found it very difficult to follow and understand what I was reading. While reading the short story, I found myself having to reread paragraphs over and over just to be able to sort of understand what was happening. When reading, I couldn’t tell the difference between any of the memories or even understand which memory was taking place, I couldn’t organize a story line in my head. However, I concluded that Wild Turkey is a war veteran suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, also known as PTSD. I thought that the layering of the different memories make the reader confused almost lost in what they read. The effect that it gives is it makes me feel like I am experiencing exactly what Wild Turkey was and had experienced. It also made me feel the way he did when looking back at these memories.
During one of Wild Turkey’s tasks in the fake village it is said that “the whole thing has worked by approximation, which Wild Turkey will especially think later, after Ramadi. Later, actual reality […] will seem also like an approximation of experience somehow, the distance between what happens […] and the ‘real’ experience […] making his own feelings seem like an exercise too. (112)”. I think this meant that Wild Turkey was being programmed on how to react in the reality of the situation which he also applied to his day to day life after the war. To be honest, I don’t even know if how I interpreted it makes sense or if it is right but these scenes, to me, were put into a disorganized way to have the reader be just as lost as Wild Turkey, just as hurt and as confused as he is.
Emilie Cohen
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Sorry you didn’t enjoy it. You’re completely right about the writing style mimicking Wild Turkey’s experience.
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I enjoyed the structure of this story because the more you heard of the scattered memories you would understand more the other ones you read. It was like slowly the author was putting context in his story and you got to connect with the character. Even if the story can be confusing it also gives us insight on how Wild Turkey lives his life not knowing what is a memory, the present or the side effects of the drugs he takes.
“waking from a lacunae fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same things” (103). This quote from the story is what put everything in percpective for the readers. It gave the sequence of the story more context and meaning; you were able to sense the confusion of the story and also the feelings the main character had towards the jumbled up memories. It also caught my attention because it reminded me of the philosophical thought; what is real. How do we know a dream isn’t just another reality and also the scientific idea that we only remember 20% of what really happened. This quote specifically provokes these thoughts and it directed me to see the story in a different light.
“They each will behave differently when threatened. They are paid for the performance of reality, for the performance of their identities rather than for their identities themselves”
This part of the book really caught my eye because again it brings up the word “reality”. It seems like Wild Turkey not only had the issues that came with his fits, but also having trouble differentiating of what was the present and what was real. It was also a provoking thought on real life and how we are justing acting like something and how when Wild Turkey was at war he just had this title that didn’t really reflect his real identity.
Martika Vilar Oliveira
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Good response. Good reading of these quotes. Remember to always include page numbers with citations.
Check.
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The structure of this piece was extremely confusing for me , I had to re-read paragraphs constantly. Even though I still found the structure of the story very hard to understand . I lost interest in the story because it kept going back and forth with memories, I was difficult to stay focused. For me personally I don’t like when stories are not well structured. I don’t enjoy reading them because it is hard to visualize and comprehend the story. The main character being a veteran who suffered from a PTSD , seizures, and drug addiction . Having gone through many ups and downs throughout his life , maybe the point of the story was to make us feel confused and as lost as the main character. One passage in the story which really resonated with me was how he emotionally detaches himself from feeling something. “ It will never be clear to him whether he is waking up from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing” ( 103) . After experiencing much pain , I think he can no longer feel anything emotionally because he has gone through so much mentally. Everything to him feels the same he no longer feels anything in his body and mind after being through much pain. He allowed himself to close the barrier and not let anything harm him anymore. Everything to him seems to be a blur , he doesn’t know what actual reality is anymore because he know for sure if it actually happened or not.
Pamela Rochefort
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The story was confusing for me as well! But, you make an intelligent statement about the protagonist and his journey.
Check.
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The story is written by the third person, mixed with real world and memory, so the plot is developed by two clues as memory and real wold. With this mixed narrative, we feel confused at beginning, but this structure directly reflects our protagonist’s condition, makes us have an empathy with our protagonist. The sentence “Wild Turkey wakes up”, starts the memory of Wild Turkey, and it repeats almost every time before Wild Turkey starts to recall. I think this repetition is very effective, it seems like sleeping is the most important and main part for him, or maybe he had a bad sleep as he always wakes up. As we know for ordinary people we have many work to do during the day, we will not empathize “wake up”. The memorise are mixed with real world, it gives us a vivid feeling that our protagonist, Wild Turkey, dose not have a clear mind, he can not differ reality from memory. The plot is developed by following Wild Turkey’s memory. Through what he recalled, we can learn about Wild Turkey’s life, his teacher, his girl friend, his friend, his military life, what happened in Iraq. His memories of military life and what happened in Iraq give a good explanation of his mental disorder. The clue of reality gives us information that he has no money, sleeps under the bridge and accept cure by attending “Wounded Hero Arts Share event” (114). We can infer that he is living in poverty. That’s really sad, a soldier from Iraq, is supposed to be hero, but with mental disorder and poor living condition. The story ends with “Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up” (120). It’s very effective, as it corresponds the story before, and it indicates that this disorder will always torcher him, he will suffer that pain forever. That’s so sad and shocking.
The fiery part is when I read that “This is six months before Tow Head, who has this day refrained from his usual running obsession with the possibility that he suffered an undiagnosed TBI at some forgotten point during his deployment, will use the replica rifle to shoot himself through his cheekbone, perhaps purposefully making his theory impossible to ever disprove or confirm” (117). From the previous reading, it’s easily to figure out Wild Turkey has mental disorder, but Tom Head, as Wild Turkey’s friend, he is simple, talking, and optimistic, I thought Tom Head may be Wild Turkey’s angle, he can save him. When I read this, he will commit suicide, this big contrast really shocks me. Tom must suffer a lot, he just hides his real feelings, so we don’t know he also has mental problem. From Wild Turkey and Tom Head, the author concerns the mental health of soldiers from Iraq, sometimes wound can not be seen, but it’s more painful.
Huikun Zhang
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Good reading. Be careful to spell characters’ names correctly. Your ideas are great, but you have some difficulty with expression. Please come and see me with a copy of your draft so I can help you with this.
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Wild turkey seems to be quiet emotionless from a young age. He did not yearn the comfort of a family, not the love from his brother or approval of the brothers wife, and even refers to the dead girl as “it” instead of “she”. “Burn it” he says casually, as he seems unfazed to burn the body that his friend murdered. Jeannie seems to have been the only person he liked however clearly pushed away, as she left him annoyed.
There are many aspects of the story that I still do not understand. For instance, the smell described in the beginning of the story and the same smell re-occurring at the end of the story forms no connection for me. What is with this girl? Is it someone of his past that he had killed later on in the story (Jeannie)? One specific passage that struck me was: “The moment when the phosphorous strobe, nestled underneath the naked girl’s back and buried beneath the shroud of the soiled bed clothes, ignites, and shatters the night into pulses of pure white light, and the absence of it.” This passage shows intense disturbing imagery. I suppose the white light refers to the purity of the young girl, and the absence of it is the innocence and purity that has left her. They have killed her. Another fiery passage in the story is found during his visit to his brother’s house: “full of resignation at this discrepancy between the practical and theoretical theologies of love, charity or whatever” (109) it seems that his successful brother is conflicted with his feelings of love for his brother and the practicality of keeping his homeless brother close.
This story was difficult to read because I found that the paragraps and story line constantly changed between past and present and was too difficult to follow. However this style of writing also can be reflective of the character; fleeting away from the “ideal” reality (getting placed in group home and getting a job) and constantly changing. (his crazy episodes)
Michaela Teolis
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This is an excellent response. I especially like your reading of the pure white light passage, and the excellent questions you ask.
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The fugue, a state where someone has lost the awareness of his own identity, of what was happening and when did it all happen. The name of this short story sums up perfectly the structure of the story itself. Confusing, messy and disoriented. For the readers, it is exhausting to follow Wild Turkey’s trail of thoughts, because it is simply all over the place. I (and I’m sure other readers have also gone through the same thing) struggle to digest the ideas and how to structure the story into one chronological story line, finding myself flipping through pages and sometimes have no idea what I’ve been reading. The author deliberately put the readers through the thoughts of Wild Turkey, Hemenway has put us in Wild Turkey’s shoes to see what he was going through. I find myself being in ‘a fugue state’ reading the story myself.
However, from the different and scattering memories that Wild Turkey can recall every time he ‘wakes up’, we learn his relationship with everyone who is significant in his life. It is like flipping through an album with pictures of everyone who has ever been a significant part of your life. Subsequently, the ‘fiery’ moment that was recalled from his memory is “Eventually, he will get medicine for his fits (…) if all three are essentially the same thing” (page 103). This is the stand-out passage when Wild Turkey foreshadows and acknowledges to the readers that anything that go on in his head might be real memories, false memories or even a blurry image of a memory when he takes the medicines. The readers then continue reading, not knowing whether anything that is told can be put in his chronological timeline. In the end, it leaves the audiences with confusion, various questions or just the simple thoughts of “I will never touch this story again”.
James Dinh
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Interesting response. Did you look up what a “fugue state” was, or did you already know this. Either way, great, but if you looked it up, be sure to cite your sources.
Check.
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The structure of this piece made it very complex and difficult to understand. Taking into account that there was no clear time frame or chronological order of events, I was constantly struggling to truly understand the meaning of what transpired. I re read certain passages and pages over and over to try and achieve some clarity. Although I experienced confusion, I believe this was partially the intention of the author, seeing that Wild Turkey’s mind is filled with confusing thoughts, unable to differentiate between the past and present. Seeing that he was a soldier and endured many hardships throughout the course of his life, we are not exactly sure whether he is distorting reality or if all the events described actually occurred. One passage from this piece that I found to be “fiery” was when the author of the story describes Wild Turkey’s thought process in the following manner: “It will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing”(103). It truly demonstrated that all of Wild Turkey’s memories may not have actually existed, and I really didn’t know when to distinguish fact from fiction. Wild Turkey has so many distorted memories and we are introduced to them in such an odd sequence, such as when: “Tom Head had mentioned that the story was about a veteran home from Iraq. Or maybe Wild Turkey only thought he’d said this when really he hadn’t”(114). Given his sense of confusion, I feel his pain as I myself had difficulty really knowing: was this story true or just a made up sequence of events?
Chad Levett
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Good response. Well-written. Be careful to cite characters’ names correctly (not Tom Head).
Check.
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I had an incredibly negative experience with the structure of the story, which is one that goes back and forth. I couldn’t even finish the short story because of the structure and how incredibly boring it was. I tried getting through the story three times, but every time I would get a few pages in I would just zone out and not care what so ever about what’s occurring in the story. The way it was structured made this a boring task. I had to be completely honest with my response to this story. The “Fiery” moment for me was when Wild Turkey fell asleep “…he wakes into: the stagnant air of coiled women’s bed linen and split chamber pot in the small house in Ramadi; the attenuated scent of the bare bed after he and Merry Darwani had anal sex for the first time”. This moment caught my attention because I don’t know what on earth is going on with this story. It’s a very weird part of the short story and got me engaged for all the wrong reasons. This is also fiery moment because it’s taboo? If the story had not been so clunky and jangled , that moment may have made me want to continue reading to figure out what was going on, but instead it just confused me a lot. I know this wasn’t the point of the assignment and I had to read it, but I had to be honest and not just say things you wanted to hear.
Angelo Bergamin
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I want to hear the truth. I appreciate your candidness.
Check.
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Generally, I’m able to finish a short story in one evening, however, this story took me much more time since I often needed to re-read some passages because the distinctions between the past and the present were not so clear which caused me a lot of misunderstandings. In fact, ‘‘The Fugue’’, was the worst I’ve ever read in terms of the structure since it goes back and forth. The author is telling the story with an alternation in the past of Wild Turkey, in his memories when he was enrolled in the army and in the present to show the effects that the war and PTSD had on him.
Despite this obstacle, the story was still able to trigger in me some kind of pity towards Wild Turkey. Indeed, the author’s use of flashback allows to readers to have a better understanding of the reality and the horrors that the people who enrolled themselves in the army are facing in their daily lives. Moreover, it gives us a true glimpse of the ordeal that they endure on their own every day.
The moment that best represent this situation in our society is when Wild Turkey goes to see his brother because he wants to eat, ‘‘Wild Turkey doesn’t know if the irony of the arrangement – of him now being actually fed like a stray dog: secretly, guilty, on the back porch, with the implied hope that he will keep coming back – is lost on his brother’s wife, who tacitly allows it.’’
Like a stray dog who only want to be fed, Wild Turkey only wants to be heal, however, both didn’t choose to be in this position and unfortunately, they cannot overcome this situation alone, they need someone that will take care of them,someone will provide the support and help that they need.
This story also reminds me of how we often see in the news in media how someone who suffered from PTSD killed himself or killed someone in his family. This shows how they are not receiving the appropriate help that they truly need since we never know what is inside the mind of someone who saw so many atrocities.
Marie-Claude Champoux
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It certainly is easy to pity Wild Turkey. Well-said.
Check.
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“The Fugue” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway is actually interesting in a confusing way. You need to almost piece the story together, because you bounce from one memory to another so quickly. You get some sort of literary whiplash (I’m sure it exists.) That’s why it’s so interesting. You’re confused & keep reading because you want some clarity. I think that maybe the jumping back & forth between memories give you a glimpse at Wild Turkey’s world on medication. They make him feel “spacey, drowsy.” (103) I get this overwhelming feeling. I feel as if I’m reading a story out of order, and that stresses me out. Or that you’re witnessing Wild Turkey’s desperate attempt to try and sort out his reality, memory by memory. When he repeated “Jeannie in a bottle!” over and over again, it broke my heart. Their little inside joke gets turned into a painful experience for the both of them. Wild Turkey most likely feels out of control, while Jeannie is more complex. You can imagine she feels sad/mad/etc. Yet, she hides it. I’m curious as to why. Did she want to avoid making him feel bad? Did she not want to admit that his “fits” cause her pain? Would that feel too selfish? Wild Turkey witnessed a lot during his deployment. From God’s Grace getting “shot through the neck” (106) to witnessing that girl get shot, and burned. I think that maybe those painful experiences made his fits worse. Which maybe lead to more medication, making his reality confusing, which lead to Jeannie leaving him, and him becoming homeless. Both the start and end of the story where about smells. Which is confusing. What’s so significant about smells?
Shanna King
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Literary whiplash! I love that. Great question at the end. And thorough reading of the story throughout.
Plus.
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The story “The Fugue” by Arna Bontemps Hemenway portrays the life of a veteran that has been struggling with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) after he has served some difficult time in the war in Iraq where he has been able to see a different type of reality. The structure of this short story is very interesting in my opinion because while I was reading it, it allowed me to see the reality between Wild Turkey’s “real life” and the time he has served in Iraq. The reason why I say “real life” it is because as we read the story we realize that Wild Turkey himself is not sure about what is real and what is in his imagination which really emphasized on the point that participating in a war like that can really affect someone’s life to a point where they do not have the capacity to distinguish what is real and what is fake. We see that idea a lot throughout the story because Wild Turkey is consistently asking himself what is real and what is not. For instance, during his time in the military at some point they went to this fake village where they were supposed to practice before they went to Iraq and he was not sure if it was fake or real: “He wonders when they are actually there, if it will seem finally real” (Hemenway 111) The structure of this short story really demonstrated the clear struggle of the main character and the difference between the two worlds: being in the military and returning home after his time. While he was in the military we realize that everything was moving on really fast, there was no time to think about anything, they had to move from one place to another. During his time, he was doing something that mattered and that was going to benefit the entire world once it was over. On the other hand, when the story would move on to the part where it explained his personal life and his life after the war we could see how everything seemed rather meaningless and he was completely lost. We are able to see that in the passage where Wild Turkey goes to visit his brother: “Wild Turkey wakes up. He’s sitting in the rear corner of his brother’s large backyard patio, the snow having fallen so gently and quietly while he slept that he is now covered with its soft, undisturbed angles” (Hemenway 107). In this part we are able to see the real difference between being in a war zone and being back home The narrator has specifically chosen the words “gently”, “quietly” and “undisturbed” in this passage (but also in most of the passages where he talks about Wild Turkey being at home we come across this idea of peacefulness something that is not experienced while he’s is at war) to really point out the fact that this was not something that the narrator lived while he was in war. It is something that he has forgotten about and this was a clear shock for him. Now when the author was referring to the time Wild Turkey was in war everything is completely different, that idea of calm and peacefulness is completely gone and that is clearly shown in this passage when they go after the target: “In his ear, Wild Turkey hears the two blasts of static. There is the sound of the steel battering the door open, the loud flash of the tactical stun grenade, the shadowy flow of the bodies in front of Wild Turkey funneling into the house” (Hemenway 117). This is where we see the real difference between his world at home and the one where he is at war, everything is portrayed as being noisy and chaotic in contrast to when he is at home everything is drastically calm.
Sahar Jaleel
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You make some terrific statements about the contrast at the heart of this story.
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I am not sure of what to feel about the story. I do not hate it, but i do not like it, as it can be confusing, and might require you to backtrack a little when reading the story’s different scenes. Since there are so many random scenarios in this story, we do not know where we were, where we are, and where we will be, but that is what I found very interesting about the story. The erratic nature of the structure maybe describing what Wild Turkey must be going through. Either he is very high on drugs and he is going through the craziest trip of his life, or he is simply lost himself. I as a reader am very lost in keeping track of the story, just like how Wild Turkey might feel lost in his own story of his life. I feel that maybe the strange structuring is suppose to make us feel lost, in order to sympathize with Wild Turkey. Another idea I though of is maybe Wild Turkey is at the very edge of his death (as he is or was in war) and he is remembering memories or getting flashbacks of his past as he is close to dying.
What I found very fiery was at the end of they story when he was experiencing a seizure of memories or flashback, ending the story with “…Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up” (120). I found it fiery because this passage woke me up, like how Wild Turkey keeps waking up. It mad me realize that maybe this story is not all pointless and stupid, but waking up is the whole idea of the story. Every time Wild Turkey feels lost, he wakes up to another scenario, like how we start to feel lost when we try to read and understand the story, we just wake up to another situation.
Avishek Paul
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Your comments are very genuine and you express your reaction to this story very well.
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I think that the fragmented structure of the story is what gives it its purpose. Indeed, I think that the goal of this short story is to help the reader understand the broken mind of someone who suffers from both psychological and physiological problems , that transform his life into a confusing blurb of black-outs and flashbacks.
“Wild Turkey”, the protagonist of the story , is a man who, since his youth , seems to suffer from some form or another of epilepsy, a neurological problem causing seizures, confusion, and memory losses with often little to no warning. To add insult to injury, it looks like he has developed PTSD from his military career. I think that the constant flashbacks and confusing storyline help us understand how he has suffered from losing control over reality his whole life, as far as he can remember.
To add to the particular structure, I found a passage to be particularly interesting, in a weird way. At some point in the story, one of Wild Turkey’s flashbacks is set in his old duplex with his ex-girlfriend Jeannie, and , after saying it playfully, he starts repeating incessantly this phrase: “Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle! Jeannie in a bottle!”( Hemenway 104) At this moment, we are made to feel the tension, even the fear, between the protagonist and Jeannie. She realises he has absolutely no control on what he is doing at the moment, that he could crush her in his arms for no reason . It is an example of the effects of physical and mental illness on the entourage of those affected by it.
Simon Perras-Dyotte
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Very good response. I like the passage you cite. Your definition of epilepsy seems to be from another source: “epilepsy, a neurological problem causing seizures, confusion, and memory losses with often little to no warning.” It’s great to look things up, but if this is from another source, be sure to cite it.
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I, personally, had a really hard time reading this story with all the flashbacks and memories popping out without an order. Therefore, I had to read it at least twice and read the paragraphs over and over to be able to sort things out, which made me realise at the end that the layering of the different memories represents the disordered and troubled life of a veteran suffering from PTSD. The main point of those ups and downs is probably to make us understand as much as possible how people who lived a war can feel lost and confused when they survive and come back to their country. In other words, it makes the readers experience the lives of broken veterans: “He’s been home from his deployment for two weeks now and he still can’t get ahold of time. In the afternoons, he gets in the shower, wastes no minutes, gets out to find it’s two hours later” (103). This passage made me feel really bad for them it also made me comprehend that there are no survivors of wars: soldiers die and the ones coming back home are only partially alive. In addition of his PTSD, we learn that Wild Turkey suffers from epilepsy which doesn’t help his case of confusion. I am not sure how accurate I am, but I feel that Wild Turkey has no perception of reality nor concept of time: “He will be honest in his report, but in his honesty he will be no more able to separate what actually happened, for the most part, from the false implantation of memory, of narrative memory, which was coeval with this experience itself” (19). I think this passage is a really important one, because it explains how everything to him seems to be a fuzziness and how he doesn’t know what is real anymore; when Wild Turkey is describing his reality, his thoughts are all over the place. Overall, I found the story hard to understand, but more I read it, more I understood the concepts and the meanings of the story which helped to like it more!
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Good! You do a great job of making sense of this difficult story.
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(please write your name at the bottom of your responses)
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In the beginning, I admit, I was a bit confused. I read the first two pages and I didn’t even know what’s happening. It’s like reading a book written in a foreign language. So I stopped reading the text. I completely ignored the story because the rate of enthusiasm and interest in me is at zero or at least below it, I think. It took me a lot of compelling to thrust my body back to the study table and dock my face into the book. I didn’t know that the structure would have a huge role in manifesting a narrative. If the structure of the story wouldn’t be as complex as this, I would finish the book smoothly and with little amount of time. But it occurred to me that it has this impression, very atypical and magnetizing that makes the reader sojourn to the story. I know I don’t want to read the story because it is very complicated but in my subconscious mind, questions are ruminating. They want to be answered. Truthfully, part of me wants to lodge in my sit and continue with the odd-looking story. As I go through the pages, it was starting to make sense to me that the story leaps back-and-fourth to different fragments of Wild Turkey’s memory lane. I spent countless hours perusing this twenty-paged story and I can’t even grasp that it took me a while to finish it.
In my interpretation of the story, everything that’s happening is just inside Wild Turkey’s head. It’s like a collection of old films and snippets of certain scenes—during war, being with his lover, rough childhood, post-war shenanigans etc. are played randomly in a pocket projector. The way the narrative was written can be baffling and sloppy for readers like me. Although, I realized that maybe the author purposely did this to show how a person’s mind really works. I believe people have this different speculation of events in their mind that makes everything convoluted. Sometimes, memories are real, other times, they are make-believe. People aren’t really sure. Well, if not for them, it applies to me. This is greatly depicted in the story where Wild Turkey is in a training exercise for war in Iraq: “They are in Arizona.. listening to the grumbling of the other guys on the team, and watches the mud ruins (fake? real?) seep with the grains and blue of the thin winter sunset” (110). Even in his own self, he’s uncertain of incidents that had happened in his life. I guess, at some point, we are all like that. Our mind gets confuse and stump by our own thoughts. Broadly, in my opinion, this story represents how abstruse our mind can be. Unaware or completely clueless, Wild Turkey represents each one of us. Whatever happens, in any timeframe of our life, or in any place, we’ll have these memories we are sure of and unsure of. It’s all inside the casque of our head.
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Your response is very thoughtful and very thorough.
As I said to you in my office, you have a tendency to use words that are not normally used in English, which hurts your writing. I’d advise you to try to simplify your writing. Don’t use words you wouldn’t use when speaking. Words like “casque, sojourn, abstruse” are very strange. It takes us out of the reading, which is a shame, because the ideas are great. This should be one goal for your first major assignment: use simpler language. It’s a hard thing to do, but it’s important.
The comparison to old film snippets is great.
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The structure of the story represents the character and how he thinks because of his disorder. It not only represents him but also war and how it is a fucked-up and really messes with your head. There is a moment where Wild Turkey says something about the way his team mates talk with their military slang. When he gives an example, it comes out: “The Shit, meaning the desert, the war, Iraq, becomes The Suck becomes The Fuck becomes The Fug becomes The Fugue, finally meaning just everything” (107). It becomes so jumbled and confusing like the way his mind works and the way the story is structured like how war is just things being thrown at you left and right until you are at the mind state that Wild Turkey is in.
Just reading the story it makes you slightly disoriented in the time frames which starts to put you in his shoes and make you feel like you are lost in the text. Just the fact that a lot of the things that are mentioned are scattered thoughts through his life and he starts to second guess if these events happened or sometimes if it happened at all. Events like this happen all threw out the story: “Wild Turkey lies still, listening to the grumbling of the other guys on the team, and watches the mud ruins (Fake? Real?) seep with the grays and blue of thin winter sunset” (110). With his disability, he sometime is not able to tell if the event that he is thinking of really happened or if his mind is making it up and since the story is in told in 3rd person the narrator doesn’t know either making some strangely formatted sentences. And all this together puts you in a weird position while reading not being able to place the story together properly making you feel like you have a slight disability. And that’s the effect of the story being all over the place and chaotic.
Kyle Smith
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Great comments on the effect of the style on the reading experience.
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I find that the structure of “The Fugue” is unique and gives a necessary feel of confusion to the short story. This is not an easy story to comprehend which suits Wild Turkey’s experiences perfectly. Wild Turkey does not live an ordinary lifestyle but one that is filled with violence and horrific situations. For the audience to thoroughly understand his point of view, the short story must be written this way to feel the full effect that war has on a someone. Also, how the short story changes from Wild Turkey’s past, future, and present is an amazing technique to understand his character development. From constantly being thrown around in life, we see how Wild Turkey became so troubled in every disturbing experience he has which leads to the causes of his actions.
A passage that I found the most intriguing in “The Fugue” is “Wild Turkey was having a very similar experience … vague references to the details of the casualty” (Bontemps Hemenway 115). Personally, I find it powerful because the narrator explains his overall confusion in life through the image of chairs in a library. Reality and fantasy is explicit as he does not know exactly where he has seen those chairs before in his life. The imagery in this passage illuminates the thought that maybe everything in his story could be true or false. Acknowledging that he worked on false military areas and other situations, I find that these actions confuse Wild Turkey so much that he cannot differentiate reality from fantasy. While this excerpt listed many dreadful locations such as military bases and funeral homes, the reader can also have difficulty in understanding what truly happened in Wild Turkey’s life just as he does.
Jessica Rupnik
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Great response. Include the entire quote next time, or at least enough for it to make sense.
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The story The Fugue by Arna Hemenway is about the difficult reintegration of a war veteran in society because he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The Structure of this story is very messy and confusing because it keeps alternating between flashbacks from his time in Iraq and his current life after the war. We can see from his behavior after he came back from the war that he is completely lost and disoriented. He cannot differentiate what’s real and what’s not anymore. As we are reading the story we tend to feel the same way. It gives us an insight on how he feels, not knowing what reality is. He keeps questioning what is real and what is fake: “These same chairs, in this very same formation, were used in the fake/real base near the fake village is Arizona, in the fake (real?) chapel area for the fake/simulates funeral service that they were all required to attend during the service” (Hemenway 115). We can see that he is struggling to go back to his normal life through the structure of the story. Also, the passages where he talks about the war are very confusing with long sentences all overlapping on one another which portrays how his thoughts about the war are: unclear, fast and brutal. It also portrays how his life s=during the war was; very fast-paced, always moving and always watching out for his life while seeing death around him. Another “firey” passage that proves this is at the very end. He makes an allusion about how throughout the story he begins his memories with “he wakes…” and how everything goes by very fast: “He wakes outside the courthouse with Jeannie even though his heart’s not really in it; he wakes on his second tour in Iraq […] Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up” (120). There is a very big emphasis on him “waking up” physically in different situations in his life but he can’t seem to “wake up” mentally in reality. He feels as if he is always stuck in a place of sub-consciousness where he keeps reliving memories but he can never seem to get back to reality.
Miruna Mincic
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You make some excellent points about the style of this story. I really like the “wake up” idea as well. First rate.
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This story’s chaotic back and forth between present and passed may confuse and aggravate readers, I’ll admit I was tempted to throw the book out the window at the beginning, but as I continued I found this chaos quite intriguing. It was like trying to solve some sort of puzzle, and piece the events in order. I still haven’t solved it and I do not entirely understand the story. Why I found it intriguing is because I felt like I was in Wild Turkeys mind because he always struggles with knowing what is real and what is just a memory. I think it really puts you into the mind of this soldier and his struggle with PTSD. I think that the author did it purposefully to help us connect with this character. ”Waking from a lacunae fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same things” (103), when I read this, even not fully understanding the story, I felt like this just gave me such a good idea of the way he lives and thinks. When I would become frustrated well reading the story, I just thought, how does he feel? This happens to him in real life all the time. Another passage that made me appreciate the story is, “Wild Turkey wakes up. He’s sitting in the rear corner of his brother’s large backyard patio, the snow having fallen so gently and quietly while he slept that he is now covered with its soft, undisturbed angles”(107). When I read this I felt as though the snow represented a moment of piece for him and his mind. Overall I may not understand the entire story, but what if it’s not meant to be understood? Wild Turkey never understood the difference between the past and present, so why should we? I think it’s meant to be confusing and messy because that is what his mind what likes, and I think it builds this connection and understanding to the character.
Caterina Saletnig
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Strong response. I like your reading of the snow imagery. I would have liked to see you go more in depth in your reading of this image. Glad you didn’t throw your book out the window.
Check.
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The layering of different memories confused me. I couldn’t situate Wild Turkey in space and time. Maybe it was intentional – the author might have wanted the reader to focus on something other than order. I must say, although the structure was all over the place, the story progressed in harmony with Wild Turkey’s understanding of life. And, I liked it.
When Friedel shoots the naked girl in the skull, Wild Turkey contemplates the aftermath of the situation: “[…] it will more than likely simply be forgotten, lost, after a brief bureaucratic murmur, to the labyrinth of operational After Action Reports. They’d be more interested in how the team was given the wrong house, the wrong info from the drone, more interested in the failure to extract the messenger man than anything else” (p.119). He concludes that the girl will be forgotten. Her existence will mean nothing in comparison the drone’s failures. His superiors have priorities, and that girl’s life will mean nothing to them. I was frustrated reading this passage. What’s the point of playing the good guys? At least, Wild Turkey could describe the absurdity of the situation. He questioned whether rules, and order was the better way out.
Six months after his deployment in Iraq, Wild Turkey went on an outing with Tow Head. We can see that Wild Turkey prefers disorder. His friend was running out into the field, “slipping falling down, getting up, still running, still yelling, though now laughing too, […] Tow Head is dancing and laughing wildly, the sound rising and rising in joy, and Wild Turkey, watching, loves him, loves him, loves him” (pp.116-117). He repeats the word “love” three times, emphasising the meaning of the emotion. Tow Head is wild; slipping, yelling, dancing, and laughing. These actions have no relation to one another, yet Tow Head made it work. How? By letting it be. He was himself, and it brought him pure joy. Wild Turkey saw that, and appreciated it.
Wild Turkey witnessed both death, and joy. He could assess both situations, and figure out what caused it. The layering of the story didn’t help in terms of clarity. He discovers that disorder is important in earlier pages. But, the situation happened after the killing of the girl. We discover that the girl has been killed two pages later. If it weren’t for the author specifying the age, time, and place of the protagonist, I’d be absolutely lost.
– Sindy Ann Fernando
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A very thoughtful, detailed, and well-written response to this challenging story. Very well-done.
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The disjointed structure of The Fugue blurs the line between the present and the past in a way where the reader is left piecing together the fragmented storyline to gain insight into Wild Turkey’s character. The reader is often transported into a different place and time as Wild Turkey inexplicably awakes in an entirely different setting. “He turns away from the window. […] He begins the long walk back. Wild Turkey wakes up. He’s eight years old, on his back in the middle of the wheat field that has sprung up by chance in the sprawling park behind his parents’ subdivision. He does not know why he’s on his back, does not remember how he got there (102). Such lapses in time were confusing at this early point in the story, while I was still trying to wrap my head around who this main character is, but I quickly saw that they are essential to a proper understanding of how Wild Turkey sees his own world. Suffering from the trauma from his time in the army, he lives in a perpetually disoriented state somewhere between sleep and consciousness. There is a recurring theme of Wild Turkey waking up which signals that he is thrust back into a conscious state, yet he himself does not know how he got there. “It will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing (103).” His drug habit combined with the trauma he carries in his memories make him disoriented and we see this is in the structure of the writing as he jumps from one moment in time to the next without any continuity.
There is also an indication that this structure is related to his fragmented sense of identity. First of all, the fact that all of his army friends as well as himself are only referred to by nicknames they acquired during their time in the army shows how much of a crucial role the army plays in their identities. I found this quote particularly evocative and crucial to understanding how someone who has lived the horrors out on the battlefield and returned to live an ordinary life constructs of reality : “This experience of the wooden amplifier had presumably happened at least three times, Wild Turkey realized : once in actuality, once in Tow Head’s recitation of the story to Wild Turkey in Baghdad, and once in the re-creation of this, his fiction writing – like a matryoshka doll of experience, understandably involuted, confused (115).” Reading this passage was a moment of fire for me because it provoked a click in my mind. I believe that Wild Turkey’s idea of recitation of stories as a valid basis for reality can indicate that much of his flashbacks from the past throughout the story are in fact happening in his own mind. The passages of his time at the training camp still plague his thoughts after he has reintegrated into society and is living a pretty drab life. As he is living the present, he needs to resort back to those old memories of elementary school, his eight-year-old self and of the old days with Jeannie to continuously remind himself of his true identity, of who he was before he became Wild Turkey, before he became a shell of a man left only to himself and his vivid memories of his time in the army.
-Anna Romanowski
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Your writing is very natural and very human. You manage to discuss very complex ideas in a way that is clear and simple. That’s really hard to do, and you do it well.
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As you told us last week, ”Wild turkey” was going to be the longest, but also the hardest story yet. I have found it really unclear and confusing. You never know if it was the past or the present and I think it was the objective of the author who wanted us to be feeling this way while reading his story. I think because that the purpose of all those confusing flashback memories was to make the reader feel some sort of way soldiers feel due to all the hard moment that happened in their life or their military service. The first quote I wanted to talk about is “It will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a lacunal fit, the medicine, or a memory, as if all three are essentially the same thing” (103). This quote is actually giving sense to what I said before and it is really important because from now you should clearly understand that it is normal to feel confused or lost because the principal character is himself lost in his mind. Lost between reality and memories, I would even say that the main character is having identity issues due to the fact he doesn’t know what is real and what is not. “He wakes outside the courthouse with Jeannie even though his heart’s not really in it; he wakes on his second tour in Iraq […] Wild Turkey wakes up, he wakes up, he wakes up” (120). This is the second quote I would like to discuss. I found it on the last page and it caught my attention because it makes you realize that he is completely lost in his mind between the reality and the memories.
Mohamed Amine Hadji
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It is a hard story, for sure. But, you haven’t sufficiently demonstrated that you read it closely enough.
Minus.
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The Fugue at first got me trying to piece the timeline of the story together. The fact that the timeline bounces between past and present made the read rather difficult to be intrigued with for me. I struggled with the delicate web of his being, because of his seizures and the PTSD, it makes for a disjointed story that i did not enjoy too much. The story revolves around this main character “Wild Turkey” who gets deployed to Iraq and is witness to many traumatizing events, many of which he flashes back to in the story line.
Personally the most fiery point in the story was when he says “Jeanie in a bottle” (104) over and over and over again. I have never seen this in a story where the words repeated so many times it covered half a page. It is a super interesting way of representing his impulsive nature and the fact that he is so delusional and drugged that he is unsure of time itself. “her presence now in the bathroom seems contiguous to her presence there last night, which makes it hard for Wild Turkey to tell how much time has passed, if any has passed at all.” (105) This is a clear indication on how much he is struggling to make sense of his own life. The blur that is happening in front of him is difficult for Wild turkey to get a grasp on. Many times during the story, Wild Turkeys memory gets triggered with past events that whip him back and forth from memory to reality, and this constant struggle of making sense of it all. He seems to go back to his 8 year old self, which i find “fire” thought inspiring due to the simple fact that at that age, we where all very simple, not needing much to be happy and not caring of anything but ourselves. That being is our true self and i think he makes flash backs to that time to try and remember the man that was before “Wild Turkey”.
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Interesting and thoughtful response.
Check.
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This story’s structure is intended to make one not only understand Wild Turkey’s point of view, but feel it. Though this structure is evidently made to make the reader feel how Wild Turkey’s mental problems work, it evokes a deeper meaning. Wild Turkey, like many other military men, lives in two different worlds, and for very specific moments. He wakes to very specific moments, and does not seem to even be alive between these moments. Even though his memory and perception of the world is clouded by his mental disability, he shares his perception of the world with his military comrades in a broader sense. What he does and who he meets in the military feels real, and the rest of the world almost seems unreal to him. He feels awake for select moments in his life; he is alive when he is with the military, and when he is having sex. The rest of the world, to him, does not exist, or merely exists as an inferior state of existence, such as sleep. When the war is over, his life slowly fades away; his friends kill themselves or turn to drugs, because they do not exist anymore either. He even best knows himself as his military nickname, as it was only when he used this nickname that he existed. Though this nickname, relative to his lifespan, is undoubtedly rather young, composing a quarter of his lifespan at the very most, more likely below a fifth, it is his identity; he was not alive before it, save for a few sexual moments, and he will likely not feel alive after it. He even buys “fifths of wild turkey to take the edge off his highs back at home.” (Bontemps, 107), using any vague association to his military past to comfort himself. This citation, lacking in powerful, deep language, displays the extent to which Wild Turkey clings to his military existence; he is nothing without it. Though he clearly lives in fugues due to his mental state, he also lives a common fugue with his military brothers. “The Shit, meaning the desert, the war, Iraq, become The Suck becomes The Fuck becomes The Fug becomes the Fugue, finally meaning just everything” (Bontemps, 107). He, therefore, lives in fugues within fugues, at times waking with no memory of the world around him, and others remembering that the only world in which he felt alive is behind him. Hence, the layered, non-chronological structure of this piece is used to showcase how directly Wild Turkey contrasts his own existence, through its moments of lust and adrenaline, and the lack of feeling between them.
-Samuel Dion-Dundas
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Really well-written and full of interesting thoughts about this story.
Plus.
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Tabiesha Thompson.
What a hell of a story!!! This story had me in a gear. Taking breaks and switching back and forth just to try and connect the dots!
When I first started reading this story, I thought Wild Turkey was going to turn out to be a very hornydog but as I continue reading I realize I was wrong. To me, this story shows the struggles of soldiers are affected by a war. They witness they are face with death each day, they see their friends being killed right in front of their eyes. Wild turkey, takes us back and forth with events that of his life. At one point, we see that he seems to have memory lost. This is related to a series of (fits) epilepsy and also being traumatize from the war, lead to him developing PTSD. ‘’ it will never be clear to him whether he is waking from a fit, the medicine or a memory” (103). We understand that lives like a homeless man and has nothing to really call is own. He stopped paying rent and he give away all his money. What I didn’t really understand was the sexual scenes in this story. Do it have a meaning in this story? I am also confuse to when wild turkey tries to recall, the way he had found the girl that Freidel killed. Did his friend raped the girl and this is what these sexual scene are related to? I really do not know what else to say about this story.
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You haven’t sufficiently demonstrated that you read the story closely enough.
Minus.
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In the book The Fuede by Arna Bontemps Hemenway, the structure of the story is personally highly confusing on how it goes to one memory and then randomly switched to another memory but still continuing the story for each memory. It’s confusing in the way that when reading this story, it makes me feel like they’re still on one of the memories while reading but they’re actually on another memory and when I continue reading, I forget what goes on in one of the memories that I just left. My reaction towards this layout is that I was confused because I never really read stories like this based on structure but it’s a type of book where you have to read it multiple times to get the story more and gain more information from it. A moment in the story that I found particular fiery was around the ending when Wild Turkey and feidel was in a house and they seen a teenage girl naked who seemed to look dirty and the girl ended damaging her head after resisting feidels help to save her. “Her head is unmade: the upper left quadrant of her skull collapsed, blood very dark on the floor, jagged-edged concavity with a fleck of white bone just visible in Wild Turkey’s flashlight here and there, the wound tangling with her hair” (Hemenway 118). I chose this passage mainly because I never heard of a scenario close to this and it shocked especially when this happened to a teenage girl. Afterwards her body ended up being burned.
Brandon Marshall Daley
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Some interesting thoughts, but you haven’t demonstrated that you read the story closely enough. It doesn’t help that you got the title wrong.
Minus.
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The structure of this story is very representative of what is going on in the protagonist’s mind. The constant changes between the present, the past and war memories illustrate the effects the war can have on people’s mental health. This character is so lost in his own thoughts that he cannot even remember what was real and what wasn’t. The exercises and drills they do seem to be messing with the character’s mind because he has a hard time differentiating the simulations to the real situations. People are paid to stay in this “village” and they wait for the soldiers to come into their houses and practice. The narrator says, “[…] it must be frustrating to them that they still feel scared when it happens” (112). To me, this shows the horrific effects of the war not only on the soldiers but these paid people who are in the simulations. Furthermore, he is single and his social life is quite weak since he sleeps under the bridge and the only person he seems to see frequently is his brother. I think this represents the impact the war has on someone’s personal life and the fact that he has PTSD and he cannot live his life as he used to obviously will have tremendous effects on his everyday life. Another passage that was fiery was the protagonist’s point of view on separating reality to simulations: “he will be no more able to separate what actually happened, for the most part, from the false implantation of memories, of narrative memories” (120). This illustrates the confusion that the protagonist feels in regards to the drills and his purpose. To stay somewhat sane in the war, I think the soldier needs to detach himself to a certain extent from reality. The drills are also terrifying and the protagonist seems to be confused because he cannot even make the separation between what he actually did and what he did as a drill. Soldiers who deal with mental illnesses and PTSD after the war is very common and this story was very interesting to me because the switching of the present and the past made me see what someone who has gone to war goes through on a day to day basis.
Mireille Jauvin
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Some interesting thoughts about the protagonist and the story.
Check.
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