SOURCE: Wilhelm, Albert E. “Bobbie Ann Mason: Searching for Home.” In Southern Writers at Century's End, edited by Jeffrey J. Folks and James A. Perkins, pp. 151–63. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

[In the following essay, Wilhelm examines Mason's portrayal of the effects of social change on her characters. Wilhelm refutes criticism that judges Mason's work as repetitive, demonstrating that her central theme is an important component of the “Big Bertha Stories” in Love Life as well as In Country.]

In the Bobbie Ann Mason story “Lying Doggo,” a young woman proclaims, “One day I was listening to Hank Williams and shelling corn for the chickens and the next day I was expected to know what wines went with what” (Shiloh 207). In “Graveyard Day,” a divorced mother observes that families “shift membership, like clubs” (167), and “a stepfather is like a substitute host on a talk show” (173). In a third story, entitled “A New-Wave Format,” the developmentally disabled characters “can't keep up with today's fast pace” and “need a world that is slowed down” (217).

Such fragmentary passages, lifted almost at random from Mason's fiction, reflect her persistent concern with rapid social change and its dramatic effect on ordinary people. In the course of some fifty years, Mason has herself experienced dramatic changes in environment and lifestyle. She grew up on a small dairy farm in rural Kentucky, but immediately after college she migrated to New York City, where she wrote features for Movie Life magazine on teen stars such as Fabian, Annette Funicello, and Ann-Margret. As a child she sat under the apple tree reading Nancy Drew and other girl detective stories, but as a young woman she earned a Ph.D. in literature and published a scholarly study of Nabokov's Ada. In the early 1970s, Mason taught at a small college in Pennsylvania; now her own stories appear prominently in anthologies used by thousands of college students.

In several interviews, Mason has commented on her own sense of cultural dislocation and its importance as a theme in her fiction. In 1985 she said to Lila Havens: “I'm constantly preoccupied with … exploring various kinds of culture shock—people moving from one class to another … people being threatened by other people's ways and values” (Mason, “Residents and Transients,” 95). In another interview, this one with Yu Yuh-chao, Mason contrasted her fiction with that of earlier Southern writers. “In the older generation,” she said, “there was a much stronger sense of the place of the South, sense of the family, and sense of the land. I guess the newer writers are writing about how that sense has been breaking down.” She then went on to emphasize the difficulty of “retaining identity and integrity in the face of [such] change” (quoted in Wilhelm, “Private Rituals,” 272).

Observations similar to these are now prominent in much of the critical commentary on Mason's fiction. Darlene Reimers Hill says that “Mason's characters live in a protean world of rapid, dizzying change. Faced with finding their identities … in the midst of constant flux, they seek to discover something to hold on to in this modern emotional environment where one must deal with new rituals and new family patterns” (83). In a similar vein, Maureen Ryan observes that Mason's characters are “overwhelmed by rapid and frightening changes” and “must confront contradictory impulses, the temptation to withdraw into the security of home and the past, and the alternative prospect of taking to the road in search of something better” (294).

Although Mason is an acknowledged master at documenting the fluidity of contemporary culture, she has also been criticized for a degree of sameness in her stories. One reviewer of Shiloh, and Other Stories balked at the frequent reappearance in different stories of young women who had recently been divorced or abandoned by their husbands (Johnson 197). Reviews of Love Life were typically quite positive but commented in passing that “characters often seem too much alike” (Freeman 1) or that “Mason dips her pen in the same ink, over and over” (Moore 7).

Insofar as these criticisms are valid, they may contain the seeds of their own refutations. In Mason's repetition we sense a sure knowledge of the characters and situations that she portrays. From apparent sameness we can derive depth and profundity of insight. Furthermore, amid those multiple accounts (almost always skillfully wrought) of separation, divorce, and adult children moving back home with their parents, Mason does offer other, strikingly different, tales of social dislocation.

In two of her best pieces of fiction, the short story entitled “Big Bertha Stories” and the novel In Country, Mason examines one of the most intense cultural shocks of the twentieth century—the broad effect of American involvement in the Vietnam War.¹ In focusing on the domestic consequences of this cataclysmic event, Mason portrays not just culture shock but the seismic upheaval of an entire culture. She depicts threats to individual identity and, by implication, to the larger national identity. None of Mason's stories are trivial, but these particular tales of soldiers' attempts to return home expand the theme of social dislocation to mythic proportions. In searching for the way back home, Mason's Vietnam veterans pursue an odyssey that is less extensive but even more daunting than that of Ulysses.

In “Big Bertha Stories,” Mason's main character is himself a storyteller, but his narratives have many loose ends. The metafictional frame story focuses on the alienation of a Vietnam veteran named Donald. As a prominent display of this condition, the stories he tells within the frame are disturbingly disjointed. Donald actually came home from the war several years earlier and promptly acquired a good job in a lumber yard as well as a wife and a son. During the past two years, however, the war has returned to him with a vengeance, and horrible memories of destruction disrupt his family and his work. After deliberately letting a stack of lumber fall, Donald abandons his job and reverts to a symbolic war zone. In his new work, far from home in the strip mines of Muhlenburg County, we see a striking parallel between the destruction of Vietnam and his company's despoliation of the land. Mason never actually shows Donald at work, but she does portray his increasingly turbulent returns home. Since Donald never made it all the way home from Vietnam, he is caught in a relentless cycle of unsatisfactory returns from his distant job operating a giant earth-moving machine.

Donald comes home sporadically, like “an absentee landlord” (Love Life 116) who doesn't really belong. His sudden reappearances invariably inspire terror in his young son, Rodney, and send him off to hide in the closet. In misguided attempts to coax Rodney out of hiding, Donald loudly narrates stories about a little boy who used to live there but who has since fallen into a septic tank or been stolen by gypsies. Donald repeatedly inflicts his own pain on his family, and in these simple tales of tragic loss he is projecting his own sense of loss of identity after having been immersed in the quagmire of Vietnam. Like the fictional boy, Donald “used to live there” but can no longer find his true home.

During one of his visits, Donald shops with his family at the mall and calmly plays video games with his son. Just when his wife, Jeannette, thinks they are about to become “a normal family” (117), they encounter a reptile show in the mall parking lot. This sudden appearance of a snake in the galleria immediately produces dissension and tears. On a small scale, this episode reenacts the same mythic pattern Donald experienced in Vietnam. He remembers Vietnam as “the most beautiful place in the world”—so lush “you'd have thought you were in paradise.” With his childlike Vietnamese girlfriend, Donald found a temporary Eden until the war “blew it sky-high” (130). He mentions the Bell Huey Cobra as one very efficient instrument in the destruction of paradise, and by evoking this specific reptilian name he echoes again the story of Eden's fall.

On every trip home, Donald is plagued with strange dreams that seem trivial but probably convey coded messages that he can never articulate. His dream of “hijacking a plane to Cuba” suggests extreme alienation from his homeland. Another dream about “stringing up barbed wire around the house” reflects his paranoid feelings of vulnerability. The lost doll of still another dream may symbolize the innocence of his youth lost in the jungles of Vietnam. When, after many such dreams, he rams his car “into a Civil War statue in front of the courthouse,” he may be expressing his contempt for earlier war memorials because the veterans of his own war have been so nearly forgotten.

If Donald's dreams are the haunting narratives created by his active subconscious, the bizarre Big Bertha stories he tells his son are even more disturbing. Big Bertha is Donald's name for a “huge strip-mining machine in Muhlenburg County” (117), but her symbolic significance in Donald's tortured fictions is even more immense than her physical size. In various manifestations she becomes “a big fat woman who can sing the blues” (120), a trainer of racing snakes, and “a female version of Paul Bunyan” (117). Like the hero of a frontier tall tale, she creates a tornado when she belches. Like a modern superhero, she is the size of a tall building and big enough to “straddle a four-lane highway” (120). The unfathomable complexity of this fictional characters is an index of her creator's inner confusion and tenuous hold on reality. The continuing inflation of her powers is a measure of his desperation.

In the most elaborate of Donald's stories, “Big Bertha and the Neutron Bomb,” Big Bertha travels to California to go surfing. At first this trip seems idyllic: “On the beach, corn dogs and snow cones are free and the surfboards turn into dolphins.” The story takes an ominous turn, however, when “the neutron bomb comes” and everyone except Big Bertha “keels over dead” (119). Donald claims that Big Bertha is “immune to the neutron bomb” (120), but his narrative simply stops without developing this assertion. In a later story about Big Bertha and a rock-and-roll band, the band “gives a concert in a place that turns out to be a toxic-waste dump and the contamination is spread all over the country.” This story is long but confusing, and “Big Bertha's solution to the problem is not at all clear” (126).

These parables of Donald's experience in Vietnam begin with playful innocence but are soon seared with horrors. Donald desperately tries to depict Big Bertha as a potential savior, a deus ex machina from the coal fields, but she repeatedly fails him. As his stories become more fragmentary and disjointed, she becomes decidedly less benevolent and more menacing. In fact, as Rodney hears more of these stories, he begins to have dreams about Big Bertha that echo Donald's memories of the war.

Donald's imaginative creations merge the idyllic with the horrible because his experiences in Vietnam did the same. There he saw the hellish infuse and overwhelm the Edenic. Now his narratives sputter and falter because he has difficulty extricating any good from the apparently pervasive evil.

Lost in his obsession with Big Bertha's huge breasts and thighs, Donald is unable to accept the very real nurturing care of the woman to whom he is married. (In fact, Jeannette accuses him of being “in love with Big Bertha.”) Just as a woman's breasts suggest sustenance and maternal care, Jeannette throughout the story is closely connected with food and food giving. She first met Donald while she was working at her parents' pit-barbecue restaurant, and on his visits home she conscientiously prepares pancakes and tries “to think of something original to do with instant potatoes.” In this home, however, any sacramental healing value of food has been sadly lost. When they sit at the kitchen table, Donald talks about C-5As and uses a food processor blade to illustrate the destructive power of a helicopter rotor. Feeling helpless and rejected at home, Jeannette takes a job as a waitress at a steak house. Even here her accomplishments are limited because the restaurant burns down one night after a grease fire breaks out in the kitchen.

When Donald finally decides to enter a veterans' hospital, he goes “with the resignation of an old man being taken to a rest home” (130). Robbed of his youth in Vietnam and subsequently unable to assume the expected adult roles of husband and father, he becomes prematurely old. As he rides calmly to the hospital, he offers one last Big Bertha story, but now her stature is much diminished. He instructs Jeannette to tell Rodney that Big Bertha is taking him “on a sea cruise, to the South Seas” (130). In evoking a vision of a Gauguin-like paradise, Donald may still be immersed in his fictions, but they have become decidedly less flamboyant. In demanding much less of Big Bertha, he is perhaps ready to recount more healing narratives as all the veterans in his therapy group “trade memories” (131).

Left alone with Rodney, Jeannette once again becomes a professional food provider. This time “she waits on families” at Fred's Family Restaurant. In doing so, however, her performance is perfunctory, and she is just waiting “for Donald to come home so they can come here and eat together like a family” (131).

Just as the war made it impossible for Donald to be a husband and father, Jeannette's vicarious experience with Vietnam has diminished her role as wife and mother. Repulsed as a provider of comfort and sustenance, she assimilates some of Donald's debilitating obsessions. She seeks psychological counseling, but lurking within the innocuous word “therapist”—presumably an agent of comfort and health—she perceives the ominous phrase “the rapist.” With Donald gone, the only man in Jeannette's life is “Mr. Bouncer,” a miniature trampoline she purchases for Rodney. When she takes a turn jumping on it, she briefly experiences an exhilarating sensation of flight. But just as the war in Vietnam has robbed her of spontaneous joy, a neighbor brings her harshly back to earth by warning, “You'll tear your insides loose” (132). This dire prediction ends her play, and the same night she has a nightmare in which bouncing on a trampoline becomes “jumping on soft moss” and finally jumping on “a springy pile of dead bodies” (132).

Even if Donald never made it all the way home from Vietnam, he got close enough to spread the contagion. His nightmares have infected his son and eventually afflict his wife. The war swept away his youthful innocence and is dangerously eroding that of Rodney and Jeannette.

In “Big Bertha Stories,” Mason focuses on the uncompleted odyssey of a single Vietnam veteran, but her novel In Country examines several returning soldiers. Throughout Donald's story the journey home is painfully repetitive and never progressive. In contrast to his aimless cyclical travel, the pilgrimage in In Country is linear and boldly purposeful. In traveling to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, one veteran symbolically completes his journey home. Since all of the novel's action takes place in the United States but the phrase “in country” actually refers to the war zones of Vietnam, Mason's title is ironic. The battlefields of another country did follow Donald and many other Vietnam veterans back to America and made them displaced persons in their own neighborhoods. Even back inside their own country and presumably far from combat, they found themselves still “in country.”² Unlike Donald, though, the protagonist of Mason's novel ultimately rediscovers and reclaims his homeland by traveling to the center of the nation's capital.

The two main characters in the novel In Country are Sam Hughes, a seventeen-year-old girl hovering on the brink of maturity, and her uncle, Emmett Smith, a confused veteran of the Vietnam War. Sam's father, Dwayne, was killed in Vietnam before she was born, and Emmett has never completely recovered from the psychic wounds he suffered there. Linked by blood and by some common problems, Sam and Emmett form a strange family unit.

Much of the commentary on this novel has focused on Sam and her coming of age. Joel Conarroe, for example, has called the book “a timely variation” of “the traditionally male-centered Bildungsroman” that “delineates Sam's quest for a father” (7). Concentrating also on Sam, Barbara Ryan's poststructuralist reading of the novel describes this search for a father as “a symbolic representation of modern man's desire for the Logos—origin of meaning and authoritative discourse” (199). While Conarroe's and Ryan's emphasis on Sam is understandable, the character of Emmett is equally important. By portraying the intertwined lives of these two characters, Mason skillfully combines the themes of the returning soldier's alienation and the young woman's initiation. Both characters display much confusion about what is worth doing in life, but both eventually gain insight. As the abandoned and mistrusted war veteran, Emmett begins the novel as an outcast—the primary embodiment of the alienation theme. In the tangled course of events during the summer of 1984, he emerges as a guide who can lead Sam and others toward maturity and wholeness. Thus, he plays a key role in the initiation theme by bringing this rite of passage to a fitting conclusion.³

Mason introduces the alienation theme by quoting lines from Bruce Springsteen's popular song “Born in the U.S.A” as the epigraph for her book. In an interview Mason commented that she incorporated this and many other references to Springsteen into her novel because his lyrics “reflected the themes of the book,” almost “like a soundtrack” (Wilhelm, “Interview,” 32). To be sure, Emmett's circumstances are not as dire as those of the speaker in Springsteen's song, but the residents of Hopewell, Kentucky, do sometimes stereotype him and other Vietnam veterans as “psychos and killers” (In Country 113)—“volatile specters emitting bands of alienation and derangement” (Myers 412). Hopewell is a typical small Southern town, and its name is probably an allegorical reference to the prevailing mood of shallow optimism. Like many other Americans, most of the residents of Hopewell would prefer to ignore the veterans and thus avoid the painful heritage of the Vietnam War.

When Emmett first returned to Hopewell after his tour in Vietnam, he was indeed a pariah. He and his hippie friends once tried to fly the Vietcong flag from the courthouse tower, and they were later suspected of burglarizing a local business. There are still rumors that Emmett is a dope dealer, that he sleeps with his niece, that he “killed babies in Vietnam,” but gradually he has come to be regarded more as an eccentric misfit than a criminal. Although many people in Hopewell find Emmett an interesting topic for idle gossip, they remain oblivious to his suffering. We see the real Emmett in an emotional scene at Cawood's Pond when he confesses to Sam: “I'm damaged. It's like something in the center of my heart is gone and I can't get it back. … I work on staying together, one day at a time. There's no room for anything else. It takes all my energy” (225).

While Emmett is the primary example of the Vietnam veteran as outcast, the book contains several more veterans who display other facets of the Vietnam legacy. According to Matthew Stewart, Emmett and his friends constitute “a microcosm of veterans' problems and troubled behaviors” (176). For Tom Hudson, the primary symptom of war trauma is impotence, and his job serves as a bitterly ironic commentary on his condition. He considers himself a wreck of a man, and he works in a run-down garage—a “yawning cave-like hole”—trying to restore wrecked automobiles (76). In one car a frozen transmission defies his efforts to repair it, and this mechanical problem parallels his psychological problems of isolation and sexual dysfunction. For Buddy Mangrum, the war has left serious physical illness as well as emotional trauma. Apparently a victim of Agent Orange, Buddy “has every symptom in the book, and the V.A. just laughs in his face” (111). Furthermore, Buddy's problems have been passed on to his daughter. Defective at birth, her tangled intestines suggest the tangled consequences of American involvement in Vietnam. The knots inside her impede the flow of life-giving nutrients just as the problems of the war have debilitated many veterans.

Pete Simms is another veteran who lives in Hopewell, but in a real sense he has never returned from the war. While in Vietnam, he had tattooed on his chest a map of the Jackson Purchase area of Western Kentucky. The map was so detailed that it indicated his street in Hopewell and even contained a tiny red dot to mark the spot where his Corvette was parked. Even though Pete has this indelible map with him always, it provides no real guidance. From the time it was created in the confusion of Vietnam, he has had to “look at it upside down,” or when he tries to read it “in the mirror it's backwards.” What was to be a reminder of home for a homesick soldier has become instead a tragicomic symbol of the veteran's lost condition.⁴

To make us feel the pain of these outcast veterans, Mason includes in her book several other young men who serve as foils. One notable example is Sam's stepfather, Larry Joiner. Unlike her real father, who suffered the agonies of battle, Joiner holds a cushy job at IBM and seems oblivious even to the possibility of battle trauma. His last name suggests that he is the generic organization man who fits easily into the fabric of society. Sam refers to him contemptuously as Lorenzo Jones because he is, to her, as remote and unreal as this character on an old radio soap opera. Similarly, Sam's boyfriend, Lonnie Malone, is a mindless adolescent whose greatest achievement in life was “sinking ten out of twelve jump shots” in a high school basketball game (33). Unable to get an athletic scholarship to attend college, he does little more than cruise Hopewell in his van and drink beer. Gilman describes him as “totally a creature of the present” who sets his sights “on the exigencies of the moment” (53). Like so many in Hopewell and throughout the country, he is unwilling to face the history of the Vietnam era and unable to understand how this painful past may limit the future.

If Larry and Lonnie are the local exemplars of health and normalcy, perhaps the suffering of the Vietnam veterans should be seen in a new light. Mason shows that the pain that made Emmett an outcast can also provide insight and enable him to guide others back to health. Although Emmett has no regular job, his work throughout the book displays important symbolic values. He will not sell microwaves or run a video game arcade and tells Sam that he can find no “job worth doing” in the community around him, but he does earn small amounts of money by repairing toasters and hair dryers, and he senses that, in the aftermath of war, the country as a whole stands in need of some major repairs.

Emmett's work on his own ramshackle house is emblematic of this larger task. Fearing that his house suffers from a hidden structural problem, he spends his days digging deep trenches to expose the foundations and reveal possible cracks. When his neighbor sees him at this task, she asks facetiously, “Are you digging to China?” This offhand remark suggests an ironic truth. If Emmett only could dig through to the other side of the earth, he might uncover in the swamps of Indochina the foundation of his own problems and the ominous structural flaws that threaten the larger society. Even if he can never accomplish this, his work remains therapeutic. He is engaged in what anthropologist Arnold van Gennep has termed the rituals of sympathetic magic—ceremonies “based on belief in the reciprocal action of like on like,” of “the container” on “the contained,” of image on “real object or real being” (4). Like Nick Adams in Hemingway's “Big Two-Hearted River,” the fictional veteran of an earlier war, Emmett performs simple tasks with painstaking deliberation in an effort to set both his house and his psyche back in order.

Emmett's role as guide becomes more pronounced when he initiates the trip to the Vietnam Memorial for Sam and Dwayne's mother, Mamaw Hughes. To understand the full significance of what Emmett has accomplished by bringing Sam and Mamaw to Washington, we must examine in some detail what happens to them at the wall. For Sam, of course, this completed pilgrimage marks the conclusion of her rite of passage into adulthood. As she travels toward Washington, she notes that she has entered a “different time zone” (11). She is progressing not just from Central to Eastern Standard Time but also from adolescence to maturity. Along the road Sam listens to the radio, but the station that plays the “oldies” begins to fade away. As she puts childish things behind her, Sam can no longer hear the songs of performers with juvenile names—“Junior Walker … and somebody else named Junior whose name Sam doesn't catch” (8).

The dominant motif in Sam's initiation is her quest for the father she never knew. She tries to forge some link with him by reading books about Vietnam, searching for old letters, dating a Vietnam veteran much older than she is, and pretending that she is a soldier walking point at Cawood's Pond. Early in the book, she scrutinizes the only picture she has of her father and then the image of her own face in a mirror. At this point, she fails to “see any resemblance” and can therefore gain no real sense of her own identity. When Sam finally discovers her father's name inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial, she understands more profoundly who he was and what he did. Since the stone wall of the memorial is so highly polished, it becomes not merely a tablet listing names but also a mirror reflecting the images of those who stand before it. In a symbolic sense, then, at the moment Sam finds her father, she also finds herself. Later, when Sam flips through the printed directory to locate her father's name in the alphabetical listings, she literally discovers her own name there, too. Coincidentally, a young army private named Sam Hughes from Houston, Texas, was one of the casualties of the war. When Sam locates and “touches her own name” on the wall, her quest is complete.⁵

For Sam, Emmett is the guide in a ceremony of initiation, and he leads her to the conclusion of this rite of passage at the memorial. In addition, Emmett helps Mamaw Hughes to complete another important ritualistic pattern. Dwayne's funeral, the ritual of letting a dead son go, was for Mrs. Hughes tragically incomplete, and her grief has been repressed and suspended for more than seventeen years. When Dwayne was killed, the family had to wait for days to receive his body, and even then they were not permitted to open the coffin and see it. Mrs. Hughes's memory of those painful circumstances is still vivid, and she says to Sam: “It was so hard without the body. … When somebody dies, you're supposed to prepare the body and watch over it. It's something that brings you all together, but he wasn't here. … We just run around like a chicken with its head cut off” (197). With her tortured grammar and simple rural imagery, Mrs. Hughes conveys a poignant picture of the pain and confusion created by this incomplete funeral.

Although the funeral itself provided Mrs. Hughes with no tangible proof of her son's death, that ritualistic need is satisfied by her actions at the Vietnam Memorial. From deep down in this dark pit, she slowly ascends the steps of a ladder so she can place her hands on the letters of her son's name engraved in the wall. In this indirect way, she is able to feel his mortal wounds and her own emotional wounds can begin to heal. In describing the symbolic values of the Vietnam Memorial, its designer, Maya Lin, has commented that the chronological listing of the war dead should “read like an epic … poem. … Locating specific names with the aid of a directory would be like finding bodies on a battlefield” (quoted in Scruggs and Swerdlow 78). Lin says that her design was influenced by the memorial to World War I soldiers at Thiepval, France. She describes this earlier monument as a “journey from violence to serenity” (quoted in Scruggs and Swerdlow 77) and says that her own design attempts “to bring out in people the realization of loss and a cathartic healing process” (quoted in Scruggs 147). For Mrs. Hughes, such a purpose is surely accomplished, and Emmett's guiding role in the healing ritual is crucial. He not only steadies the ladder while Mrs. Hughes climbs; he is also the one who sensed her need and persuaded her to go to the Vietnam Memorial in the first place. Emmett's family relationship to Mrs. Hughes is that of a very remote in-law. He is, in fact, the brother of her former daughter-in-law. Nevertheless, this outcast from society becomes, for Mrs. Hughes, an agent of renewal and wholeness.

The scene at the Vietnam Memorial contains much imagery of wounds and healing, of death and rebirth, and this imagery relates to all who are there. As Sam and the others approach the memorial, she thinks of the V-shaped monument as “a black boomerang, whizzing toward her head” (239). For Sam and countless war veterans, the memory of Vietnam has been for many years just that—the embodiment of a destructive force that returns unerringly to attack no matter how far away they fling it. Later the memorial is described as “a black gash” in the hillside, a “giant grave” with “fifty-eight thousand bodies rotting … behind those names” (239). These dark images of injury and death are soon translated into images of health and rebirth. Mircea Eliade has observed that many important ceremonies of transformation “clearly imply a ritual death followed by a resurrection or a new birth” (xii–xiii). In this case, Sam and her companions must touch the open wound, must go down into the dark grave, before they can begin the renewal process. As Sam stands “deep in the pit,” she feels an intense surge of energy inside her. It is so “massive and overpowering” that it “feels like giving birth” (240). Like Mamaw Hughes, Sam also ascends from the grave by climbing the steps of the borrowed ladder to touch her father's name. On the final page of the novel, Mrs. Hughes provides a simple but moving description of what she and the others have experienced: “Coming up on this wall of a sudden and seeing how black it was, it was so awful, but then I came down in it and saw that white carnation blooming out of that crack and it gave me hope” (245).

The last sentence of In Country describes Emmett “sitting … cross-legged in front of the wall” with the calmness and serenity of a Buddha. In this peaceful posture, “his face bursts into a smile like flames.” If Emmett's dreams have been plagued by memories of fire fights in Vietnam, he is now the embodiment of a cleansing fire that can burn away the pain and horror of war. At this point of stasis, Emmett has progressed far beyond Donald in “Big Bertha Stories” or Springsteen's anonymous veteran in the novel's epigraph. Unlike these truncated stories, In Country has become a “fully realized returned veteran parable” that offers “specific narrative healing rites” (Myers 422).

At the memorial, Emmett finally completes the heroic journey described by Joseph Campbell and others. In his journey “the mythic circle includes a voyage home, the bringing of the great boon to his society, the communal dispensation of hard-earned power and knowledge” (Myers 416). By characterizing Emmett as a wounded outcast who ultimately becomes a guide for others, Mason produces a fitting transformation of a specific classical myth. In the accounts of the Trojan War, Philoctetes was a Greek warrior whose wound would not heal. Since this wound was so foul-smelling, his companions abandoned him on the island of Lemnos. After many years, however, the Greeks realized that Philoctetes was the only person who could lead them to victory over the Trojans, and they welcomed him again into their ranks.

By emerging from his alienation and becoming a guide for Sam and Mrs. Hughes, Emmett acts out a similar pattern. Emmett does not lead military forces to victory on the battlefield, but he does guide survivors to peace. As David Booth observes, it is “precisely from among the victims of war” that “healing is to be sought” (109). Furthermore, Mason suggests that what happens to Sam and Mrs. Hughes at the Vietnam Memorial can happen also to the larger community. Emmett looks forward to the time when all his friends in Hopewell can share this experience at the memorial. Near the end of the book he says with confidence, “They're all coming one of these days” (241).

Notes

1. Mason apparently worked on these pieces concurrently. Although “Big Bertha Stories” was not published in book form until 1989, when it was collected in Love Life, it first appeared in Mother Jones in April 1985 (the same year In Country was published).

2. In Mason's choice of title, Owen Gilman Jr. sees “a provocative twist to the combat soldiers' terminology for actually arriving in Vietnam, turning the situation around completely” and “bringing the Vietnam aftermath fully into the open in America” (51). To emphasize the ambiguity of Mason's title, Gilman uses “In Which Country?” as the title for his own commentary on the novel. Although Mason borrowed her title from military slang of the Vietnam era, it echoes the title of another well-known war story—Hemingway's “In Another Country.” There, too, the focus is on soldiers whose wounds make it difficult for them to return to the ordinary world.

3. In an essay emphasizing Mason's realism, Matthew Stewart acknowledges that “Emmett's story becomes inseparable from Sam's and is coequal in importance” (167). Stewart praises Mason's accuracy in portraying the psychological and sociological problems of Vietnam veterans, but he criticizes the novel's conclusion as a “facile, Pollyanna ending characteristic of television” (179). In labeling the final section of the novel “Fantasyland” (177), he obviously disavows Emmett's importance as a guide.

4. In David Booth's reading of In Country, the actual geographic setting in rural Kentucky is incidental. He contends that “the action really occurs in a universal American geography of fast-foods, malls, television serials, HBO, MTV, and pop music radio” and in the even more inclusive setting “of a ‘waste land,’ together with the symbols, motifs, and narrative structures of the grail legend that communicate that geography” (99). Obviously, Pete's simplistic map will be of little use because it hardly begins to chart these complex domains.

5. Mason, whose own first name could apply to either gender, had a similar experience at the wall that influenced her writing of In Country. In describing a visit to the memorial in 1983, she says: “Quite by accident, my eyes fell upon my own name on the wall, a version of my name—Bobby G. Mason. I found out later that Bobby G. Mason was from Florida. I learned also that there were four guys named Robert Mason whose names were on the wall. … I knew then that Vietnam was my story too, and it was every American's story. Finally, I felt I had a right to tell a small part of that story” (quoted in Brussat and Brussat 2).