While I have a hard time personally relating to any of the
characters in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime
Walk by Ben Fountain, I found it to be one of the most thought-provoking
novels that I have read. Just yesterday, one of my best friends from high
school was deployed after several months of marine boot camp and training. I
know that I will never be able to understand what he experiences, but this
novel gave me some intriguing insight, even if Fountain was never in the army
himself. Billy is a 19-year-old, just like me, yet my life and his life have
hardly anything in common. It got me thinking, what is returning to America
from war really like?
It seems as though Billy and the other Bravos are never at
ease. They are always on their toes. At one point the narrator explains Billy’s
thoughts, “If you relax even for a second, it will take you, thus a strategy is
revealed: Don’t relax” (43). In Iraq, the Bravos are armed and on the move.
That’s their life style. They don’t even know what else to do. For example, during
the halftime show, fireworks go off that resemble the sounds of war in the
Bravos’ minds. As soldiers, the young men don’t know how to relax and enjoy the
big halftime production that many other Americans watch on a weekly basis.
The Bravos are also constantly thinking about sex and having
degrading conversations about women. Billy, while having the same thoughts and
conversations, dreams of the possibility of a relationship. The narrator
relays, “It’s not so much that he’s nineteen and still technically a virgin as
it is this famished feeling deep in his chest… He needs a woman. No, he needs a
girlfriend…” (26). While I live in an environment where I could meet a guy and
fall in love any day, Billy lives in a constant battle just to stay alive. Billy
thinks, “Or maybe not so much a function of calendar days as the way Iraq aged
you in dog years…” (86). Billy and I may be the same age year wise, but not in
experience or knowledge. What he sees and does in Iraq is unimaginable to me.
What the rest of the 19-year-olds do at college is just as unimaginable to him.
Is there some way that I could really know what Billy feels
and experiences? I don’t think it is possible because nothing can be real to me
unless I experience it. I won’t ever know what my best friend Kyle experiences
as a marine, and I won’t ever really know what returning to America from war is
like. But, this novel helped me think of war more objectively. The narrator
tells Billy’s thoughts, “… the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after
ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the
ultimate black hole of futile speculation” (307). And this is what Fountain is showing we all
have in common; we all have past memories, present responsibilities, and a
completely unpredictable future.
I think this is a very important part of interpreting the novel. Once you, as a reader, can acknowledge that you will not be able to fully understand what it's like to be a soldier returning from the war, you are able to view it with an outside perspective. You don't know what it feels like to not be able to enjoy fireworks, and you don't know what it's like to be up and shipped to a country far away to fight for freedom. And that's okay. This fact of not knowing gives the reader a raw reading of the book. It's the same as reading a book with a main character who has been stranded on an island, or has lost a limb. Once you stop comparing yourself, you are able to be get a raw reading of the novel and experience it through your unbiased lens.
ReplyDeleteI definitely agree that is difficult, impossible, rather, to truly put oneself in Billy’s shoes in terms of the specific horrors he has witnessed and experienced during his service. This post does a good job of contrasting the reality that we as typical college students experience with the reality that Billy experiences when he is in Iraq. However, I don’t necessarily feel like this was the predominant idea in my interpretation of this novel. In part, this is because the majority of the novel takes place here in America, in an extreme situation that seems surreal to Billy, perhaps less real than being in the war. To me, Fountain’s intention in writing this book was less about placing blame and guilt on the average American who is unable to truly understand how difficult war is for the soldiers who fight. Rather, through writing from Billy’s sobered, existential perspective, Fountain intends to point out many obsessions, oversights, and shortcomings of mainstream American culture. Comparing and contrasting this culmination of American culture with the war in Iraq lends a very serious emotional moral heft to Fountain’s criticisms. Additionally, I don’t think this would be very successful if Billy weren’t a highly relatable character in many ways. Billy asks existential questions that we all struggle with, questions which make excessive displays of wealth, commercialism, sexualization, and violence seem silly and very offensive. This stark contrast between superbowl frivolity and blind support for the troops and the angst Billy is experiencing even made me physically tense at points. One example is when Billy is trying to decide if he should run away and he has “120 seconds to figure out what he’s doing here on planet Earth” (296). The impending return to war gives this entire novel emotional urgency, which I found very effective.
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