Garry Trudeau, The Long Road Home and The War Within

In this two-part graphic novel, “” quarterback and football coach B.D. loses his leg in the war in and copes with homecoming as an amputee. B.D. comes to terms with his injury and experiences anger, post-traumatic stress disorder, and strained relations with his loved ones. Trudeau’s graphic novel takes an unflinching look at the toll the has taken on veterans and their families and honors the sacrifice and suffering of our troops with humor and compassion.

1. Although these two books were published as graphic novels, they are actually collections of “Doonesbury” comic strips, issued over a period of several years. How does the format of the four-panel comic strip, with its expected punch line at the end, affect your expectations of the story? 2. In 1995, after a “Doonesbury” strip suggested that Bob Dole exploited his wartime injuries for political purposes, John McCain denounced Garry Trudeau on the floor of the Senate, saying “Suffice it to say that I hold him in utter contempt.” Ten years later, McCain wrote the Foreword for The Long Road Home. What are the political stakes of B.D.’s story, as the war in Iraq continues? Or do these books transcend politics? 3. “Doonesbury” has always been known for its biting (to say the least) of American politics and culture. How does satire shape the story? Does satire enhance the book’s compassion for injured soldiers? What is the difference, in the context of B.D.’s story, between satire and humor? 4. Since these two books collect an ongoing comic strip (still continuing in daily “Doonesbury” strips), B.D.’s story doesn’t come to a resolution in the same way another novel might. Despite this fact, does B.D. arrive at the end of a journey of healing? What does the open-ended nature of this story suggest about the nature of recovery and reconciliation?

Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country

A coming-of-age novel that confronts the reverberations of the Vietnam War, In Country is the story of Sam Hughes, a young woman whose father was killed in Vietnam before she was born. The novel follows a summer in Sam’s life as she and her uncle, a Vietnam veteran, attempt to understand the war’s legacy in their rural Kentucky community. As they travel to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, Sam and her uncle learn that the casualties of war are not confined to those who experienced combat.

1. Looking at a picture of her father, Sam reflects that “Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing.” How do Sam’s investigations into her father’s experience in Vietnam disrupt her community’s attempts to forget the past? 2. The phrase “in country” is used by veterans and others to refer to being in Vietnam. What are some other meanings of this phrase in the context of the novel? 3. Do Sam and Emmett finally find peace—or at least begin to understand their experiences of loss and trauma—at the end? 4. In Country is set in the summer of 1984, about a year after the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was first unveiled. The Memorial was extremely controversial at first because of its non-traditional design. How does the novel examine the issues of memory, remembrance, and memorialization? What are the traditions and counter-traditions of memory that the novel portrays?

Caryl Phillips, Crossing the River

Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River explores the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. In the mid-eighteenth century, three African children are sold into slavery. Four intertwined stories in this novel trace the historical and personal consequences of that crime. Yet the stories are not of the children themselves, but of symbolic characters who represent particular aspects of the institution of slavery and the African diaspora: Hamilton, the captain of the slave ship that transported the three children; Nash, a freed slave acting as a missionary in 1820s Liberia; Martha, a woman who searches for her sold-away daughter after Emancipation; and Joyce, an Englishwoman in the 1940s who marries a African-American soldier.

1. The four narratives in Crossing the River aren’t directly connected to each other. Some critics have remarked that the novel is really a collection of four novellas (or long short stories). What connections can you draw among the stories? Is there any central connecting theme, other than the African diaspora? 2. This novel argues that people of African descent were not, and are not, the only victims of the slave trade. To a certain extent, the slave trade corrupts all members of a society. How is this idea particularly relevant in the last story, of Joyce and Travis, the one that seems the most remote from the historical context of slavery? 3. How does shame figure into the novel? How are the characters (and societies) in the four different narratives implicated into or affected by shame? 4. In the framing sections, a father laments the sale of his children into slavery, and says, “if I listen closely, I can rediscover my lost children.” Does he hear them, in what he describes in the end, as “the many-tongued chorus of the common memory”?

Julie Otsuka, When the Emperor Was Divine

A father is taken away from his family in the middle of the night, and imprisoned. A mother and her two young children are ordered to report to the authorities, herded onto a train, and sent to an isolated camp where they suffer years of hardship and deprivation. This is the story of what happened to many families in 1942, but the setting of When the Emperor Was Divine is California, not Europe, and Julie Otsuka’s restrained, elegant novel considers the experience of Japanese-Americans. In her unsentimental view, Otsuka examines the personal consequences of injustice and the meaning of freedom during wartime.

1. The woman, the girl, the boy, and their father are not given names in the book. The story moves from the third person, in which the experience of the characters is described by an omniscient narrator, to the first person, in which the children describe their experiences after the war. Do these narrative techniques distance the reader? Does it make the characters’ experience more universal? 2. The family listens to the radio, and the children read comic books and newspapers. Does popular culture make the characters seem more assimilated to American culture? What distinguishes them from their friends and neighbors, at home and in the camp, both Japanese-American and other ethnicities? 3. In the camp, the girl’s watch has stopped at 6:00, and the mother can never remember what day it is. The postcards from their father always say the same thing. How does the experience of war, displacement, and imprisonment affect the experience of the passing of time? 4. To an extent, neither the mother nor the father resist their internment or imprisonment. Is this a coping strategy that helps them to endure what seems to be the inevitable? Are there ways in which characters (either the main family or the other named characters) resist injustice? What is the significance of the father’s apology on the last page?