SOURCE: O'Brien, Timothy D. “Oppositions in In Country.” Critique 47, no. 2 (winter 2000): 175–90.

[In the following essay, O'Brien discusses symbolism and imagery in the novel In Country, noting how these elements lend depth and breadth to Mason's characters as well as the novel itself.]

Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country presents a surface rarely disturbed by signs of its coded structure. The characters and the world they inhabit seem real; the emotional and physical problems they face familiar. Much of the commentary on the novel, in fact, focuses almost exclusively on the novel's characters—Sam and Emmett particularly—as if they were real people whose lives continue beyond the novel. Sam perhaps forgets about the wounded and impotent vet Tom and advances toward her college degree at the University of Kentucky. Emmett likely goes on to live a happier life while flipping burgers at Burger King rather than flipping out during flashbacks to his Vietnam experience. The familiarity of the novel's surface makes it easy to project these characters into the future, to worry about their “lives” outside the fiction. However, this familiar, representational surface can, if the reader permits, do something else: it can obscure the novel's rich, symbolic subsurface, or so I call it, though it is more “on the page,” more in the words than any representational meaning that the reader conspires with the author to build. That subsurface—repeated images, symbols, and motifs; playful use of characters' names—is vital to the novel's meaning. It contributes to what is almost a stereophonic effect, whereby the characters' involvement in—and attempt to work out—troublesome oppositions at the representational level can be “heard” against the authoritative, definitive formations at the symbolic level. The tension between these two levels, then, becomes an essential element of the novel's meaning, and especially of the work's problematic ending.

Another model for understanding this tension is visual: The characters in the representational foreground of the work must align their personal use of symbols with the authoritative value those symbols have in the symbolic background of the work. Acceding authority to the characters' use of these symbols can often be a mistake, as is the case especially with Emmett's egret. Morrissey, for instance, interprets the egret and other images of flight as unequivocal representations of fulfillment and “life continued” as opposed, for example, to the Vietnam Memorial, a kind of fallen bird suggesting unfulfilled lives (63). Flight is only part of what the egret embodies, however. Originally the egret is pictured as a wader. Emmett remembers seeing “it in the rice paddies, dipping its head down in the water, feeling around for things to eat” (35). It would sit beside the water buffalo, “like a little pet,” sometimes “on the water buffalo's back”; it would even pick ticks off the larger beast's head, and the water buffalo would turn up things for the egret to eat (36). Originally, then, the white egret merely contributes to a complex symbol consisting of both groundedness and elevation. The violence of war sends the egret into flight, as is clear in one of Emmett's early memories of the bird: “Once a grenade hit close to some trees and there were these birds taking off like quail, ever' which way. We thought it was snowing up instead of down” (36).

The water buffalo-egret symbol suggests a lost mutuality, an original wholeness, though not a unitary state or object such as the phallus in Lacan's system, for instance. In terms of this foundational symbol of mutuality, the novel unfolds along two different paths. One of these paths documents the cultural fragments of this lost mutuality, with the characters on the mimetic level trying to assemble or reassemble their lives out of the pieces. The other path displays symbolic markers of the mutuality as a linking of apparent opposites. The signs of fragmentation fall out into oppositions that correspond to the groundedness of the water buffalo and the transcendence of the egret in the original symbol: depression/elevation (Hopewell/Lexington and the Vietnam War Memorial/the Washington Monument); women/men; personal/public (Dwayne's diary/his letters home, for example); popular culture/official culture; unclear closure/certain closure (the Vietnam War vs. World War II); and complicity/separateness. In view of these oppositions, Emmett's longing for the singular, pristine egret is less a positive thing than some commentators make of it.¹ Separated from the water buffalo, the egret resembles more the removed, disdainful, phallic Washington Monument than some healing alternative to the paralyzing oppositions in the novel.

As I have suggested, these oppositions emerge against a subtle background of wholeness built into the novel's nonmimetic fabric of connections. That nonmimetic fabric consists of symbols, patterns of imagery, and even names, of whose suggestive value the representational characters are largely unaware. The Vietnam Veteran's Memorial is the most striking and encompassing of these signs. As a pair of wings buried in the ground, it serves as a conclusive expression of the groundedness/transcendence opposition, and of others as well. Suggesting femininity, the venereal, its V-shape forms a visual and spatial pun enriching the verbal pun on “in c(o)untry.” Designed by a Vietnamese-American female, the V-shape also inscribes Vietnam/Viet Cong into the American landscape (Carton 314). At the same time, carved into it are the names of American men, “c(o)untry” boys; and at the very center line it reflects the phallic Washington Monument. While it is a medium upon which names are formally, publicly inscribed, it receives more personal, more “popular” forms of expression—names highlighted by yellow magic marker, monumentalized by cigarette packages, contextualized by handwritten notes, even decorated by a carnation blooming out of a crack (241–42).

Less obviously than the wall, other markers in the novel embrace oppositions, even while functioning for the characters as fragmented objects of pursuit. Bruce Springsteen serves as just such a marker. Sam sees Springsteen as fulfillment through escape, as flight; he will liberate her from her unpromising, enclosed world. Twice Sam imagines herself as the female groupie in Springsteen's “Dancing in the Dark” music video. Near the end of the video, Springsteen brings the girl out of the audience pit and up onto the stage to dance with him. Sam “loved” that part of the video (97). Along with escape to Disney World and the freedom of owning a car, that video constructs Sam's fantasy of what she might become. When thinking of her responsibility to Emmett and her need to find out about the mysteries of the Vietnam war that seem to lurk behind all her dealings with other characters, Sam imagines this scenario:

Sam was worn out with worrying that Emmett was going to die. Maybe it was better not to care. Sam could drive her VW to Disney World and get a job there and make all new friends. One day soon, as soon as she could think straight and get some business taken care of, she'd do that. And somewhere, out there on the road, in some big city, she would find a Bruce Springsteen concert. And he would pull her out of the front row and dance with her in the dark.

(190)

For Sam, then, Springsteen represents liberation from Hopewell, a name that in part suggests something even deeper than the audience pit in the video. Envisioning liberation that comes from above and takes her away, Sam must already see herself in the audience pit, in a depressed area, not only because of her youth and lack of means but also because of her gender.

In a sense Mason coopts Springsteen and Hopewell from their popular culture to sustain the dominance of her more formal, written document. The name Springsteen combines both sides of the work's central lines of opposition, suggesting not just the kind of fragmentation driving Sam and Emmett's dreams of escape but also the unity and mutuality imagined in the egret/water buffalo pairing and the hole/wings configuration of the Vietnam Memorial. The boundlessness of “spring” and the sense of containment in “steen” (“stone jug”) signal this possibility. “Springsteen” functions as allusion, as the name of a player in our and Sam and Emmett's cultures, but also as part of the verbal fabric of the novel, as a suggestive image connecting with others to form an authoritative background to the mimetic surface of the work. In terms of that background, Hopewell is not simply “hopeless,” as many of the characters see it, but rather a word suggesting the unity of something boundless with something limited. “Moon Pie,” with its combination of transcendence and containment, works similarly, though it also names a pet cat and serves as one of the markers for the often repeated cat imagery in the work. At the level of image rather than mere word, Emmett's skirt itself, suggesting certainly a kind of androgynous possibility, expresses a form of that opposition as potential unity: the skirt has a pattern of “elephants and peacocks on it” (26), a pairing of the same sort as the egret/water buffalo one. Even Sam's accessorizing contributes to this background vision of the linking of opposites: she fills the holes she has recently poked in her ear lobes with earrings shaped as stars (39).

The names “Sam” and “Emmett” also embrace oppositions. Sam is both “Sam” and “Samantha,” and thus stands as another androgynous possibility, though her being called Sam throughout most of the novel marks fragment. “Sam” also implies a cultural preference for male offspring and a need on Sam's part to deny her gender so that the vets will accept her and to fashion a rebellious character for herself. As Sam recognizes (167), “Sam” alludes to “Uncle Sam.” That fact provides some fascinating ironies as Sam/“Sam” exposes “Uncle Sam's” indifference to the vets, while she sympathetically interacts with them, and as she duplicates the country's/Uncle Sam's denial of the horror of their experience by rejecting the version of her father that she discovers in his war diary. Still, the other aspect of “Sam” that has gone entirely unrecognized is its expression of the Viet Cong side of the war: “Viet Cong” is a shortened form of Viet Nam Cong Sam (emphasis mine), meaning Communist Vietnam. Cong Sam (Communism) means to share (Cong) property (Sam). Apart from the intriguing notion that “Sam” is the property over which the two sides were fighting, this double meaning to “Sam” names an opposition and also implies a connection prior to the violent distinction acted out in the war. “Sam” is both Uncle Sam and the Viet Cong. As a name, “Sam” suggests an original connection of oppositions and the potential for healing; however as a character, Sam spends much of her time reaching for fragments.

In less-obvious ways, “Emmett” expresses the same two sides of the conflict. First and most simply “Emmett” derives from the female name “Emma,” thus suggesting the androgynous tendencies that Carton has discussed in connection with Emmett's skirt (Carton 313). Also, an emmet is an ant. Whimsical as that suggestion may at first seem, it makes sense in terms of the verbal patterns underlying the representational surface of the novel. First, the names in the work often have an allegorical tinge to them: Sam, Moon Pie, Hopewell, Dawn Goodwin, Donna (aka Madonna), Mrs. Castle (Sam's former English teacher), Lexington (word, law), and the war-loving Pete Simms (simian). What's more, the novel's verbal fabric is thick with animal imagery; it is a virtual animal fable world made up of cats, dogs, fleas, ants, chickens, rabbits—James Stewart's Harvey (50) and Grace Slick's “White Rabbit” (111)—and any number of birds. In this context Emmett's fondness for the natural enemies, birds and cats, again speaks to the novel's treatment of oppositions. And so does his name.

During her stay at Caywood's Pond, Sam pauses at a stump to observe millions of ants taking apart a bit of plastic and marching off with the pieces. Associating the ants with the fleas Emmett has earlier tried to exterminate from his house, Sam thinks that Emmett, during a flashback, must have thought the “fleas were the Vietnamese”: “How often had she heard the enemy soldiers compared to ants, or other creatures too numerous to count? She remembered someone saying that the GIs would fight for a position and gain it and then the next day there would be a thousand more of the enemy swarming around them” (209). The enemy, the members of the alien culture, are ants and so too is Emmett, though he is also a former GI who fought against them: “Emmett had helped kill those Vietnamese, the same way he killed the fleas, the same way people killed ants … Emmett set off the flea bomb just as casually as he would have launched a mortar into the sky, the way the soldiers did in the war, the way he pumped the firing button on the Atari” (209). Having suddenly become disgusted with war as a result of reading her father's war diary, Sam here sees Emmett only as ruthless murderer. She is unaware—as limited mimetic character—that Emmett's name makes him a victim as well, a mere ant. Emmett is what he opposed in combat.

Earlier in the novel, however, Mason first establishes this playful but evocative connection. While smoking a joint and decorating the red ceramic cat to give to her mother, Sam free associates from one observation to another. One sequence of those associations connects Emmett and ant: “Moon Pie was missing. But Moon Pie occasionally went off on little trips. Emmett was missing too. Sam watched an ant crawl into a hole in an electrical receptacle. A moment later, it crawled back out” (139). Perhaps minor and incidental by some standards, this verbal play captures the way in which the novel works behind the characters' backs. Here Emmett is an ant, entirely unconscious of the hazards around him, a victim merely of larger political and technological intentions. In fact the passage and the later one within the Caywood's Pond episode recall the well-known parable from A Farewell to Arms during which Hemingway implicitly compares the ants that Henry steams in his camp fire to soldiers dying because of the indifference of war (Hemingway 327–28). As much as Sam is both Uncle Sam and Vietnam Cong Sam, Emmett is both GI ant and Viet Cong ant. Again the verbal level of the work presents oppositions and at the same time suggests their original and potential linkage.

In terms of Sam's development, this connectedness of things amounts to something rather unglamorous: recognition and acceptance of life's complicity. From the beginning, however, Sam seeks flight. Mason marks this fact not only by making Sam an habitual runner, but by building into her personal history a seminal event. That event occurred when she was just a toddler attending a peace demonstration on the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington with her mother: “She remembered that the hippie had given her a helium balloon, and she accidentally let go of it. She remembered seeing it float away, high over the University of Kentucky campus, and she cried because the balloon had seemed important, something to hold on to that day” (66).

Sam favors Anita Stevens because she appeals to that lost sense of flight. Anita is Emmett's Kentucky red bird (114). In Sam and Emmett's “tacky house, Anita looked out of place—like a flamingo in a flock of chickens” (101). Sam emphasizes Anita's exotic, individualistic, free nature. However, the flamingo—like the egret in the rice paddy with the water buffalo—is a wading bird and not particularly individualistic in its own setting. Sam's comparison, then, actually emphasizes Anita's down-to-earth nature, her acceptance of Emmett; however, it also says much about how Sam understands Anita in terms of her own needs. Even when Sam has a chance to take in the horror of Vietnam, she avoids it, using her personal version of Anita as a pretext. In the bathroom at the veterans' dance, Pete's wife Cindy tells Sam about all the cut-off Vietnamese ears that Pete had brought home from Vietnam. However, “Sam didn't want to hear about ear collections. She didn't believe Cindy. She hurried away. Cindy wasn't somebody who loved to laugh, like Anita. In the gym, Donovan was singing “Sunshine Superman” (123). Sam's preference for what she sees as Anita's levity and the juxtaposition of that preference with the playing of Donovan's song about magical escape from, and elevation above, the details of life exposes her desire to escape from the dreary, the ordinary, the complicit.

However, the trajectory of that desire eventually puts her in as mundane, traditional a position as Cindy's: “She wished she could go to Tom's garage apartment and watch him work on a dirt bike. She wanted to see his scars” (123). As a result of her imagined rebellion and escape, she takes on the traditional role of the female witness to the male spectacles of technology and battle wounds (Jeffords, 9–17). Like Emmett's search for the egret, Sam's rebellious misreadings of others lodge her in the same traditional position from which she is trying to escape. It is not much of a leap from Lonnie, the washed-up jump shooter, to Tom the scarred veteran who tinkers with motor bikes; from Dawn, the anti-abortionist who has to get married, to Sam, the pro-abortion “rebel” who is dangerously close to dedicating her life to finding a way to help Tom achieve an erection. Even Sam's apparent distaste for her mother's new husband exposes the way in which she maintains the oppositions by which she feels limited. She calls him Lorenzo Jones. However, his name is, suggestively, Larry Joiner. She feels strange, also, when she sees him, “a grown man, playing with a baby” (232).

Sam finds herself at Caywood's Pond as a result of a similar trajectory. Dissatisfied with the letters of empty affection and unexamined, trite values that her father sent home from Vietnam to her mother, she journeys to the Hughes farm in search of some truth about Dwayne and herself. At the farm she discovers ordinariness and decay, images of her own human condition—“the smell of dirty farm clothes, soiled with cow manure,” a sodden bathroom “rug that lay rotting around the sweating commode,” a “television missing a leg,” a rusty bucket for pea picking “with a rag stopping up a hole,” a mangy dog, “her dumb aunt Donna,” and most importantly Dwayne's diary from Nam, with its images of “the rotting corpse, her father's shriveled feet, his dead buddy, those sickly-sweet banana leaves” (206). As a result of her inability to “get these sensations out of her head,” Sam feels a new reality: “Now everything seemed suddenly so real it enveloped her, like something rotten she had fallen into, like a skunk smell, but she felt she had to live with it for a long time before she could take a bath” (206, emphasis added). Sam “falls into” that reality, that sense of her own involvement in living, while seeking the clear, lost, even transcendent meaning in her life figuratively the balloon she had lost as a small child in Lexington.

This careening from one extreme to another occurs again as Sam runs off to Caywood's Pond, another sunken area, a place to fall into. Interestingly the stance she takes toward Emmett as a result of reading her father's diary—rejection of the rotten facts of war and life, of her father's honest, personal feelings, and therefore of Emmett—repeats something she has just criticized: Mrs. Hughes's more complacent denial of the details in the diary. (She chose instead to accept the banal, “loving,” more public letters he had sent to them.) Violently ripping a page from her father's diary, Sam writes a note to Emmett: “You think you can get away with everything because you're a V.N. vet, but you can't. On the table is a diary my daddy kept. Mamaw gave it to me. Is that what it was like over there? If it was, then you can just forget about me. Don't try to find me. You're on your own now. Goodbye. Sam” (207). Here Sam becomes the transcendent egret, the accusatory Uncle Sam, and the monolithic, phallic Washington monument. She transforms the private journal into a communication; she employs the power of the pen/pencil/penis/Washington monument to condemn the vets' unsavory internal experience of the war. Denial of the reality of that experience, however, perpetuates it: Sam flees the stink of her father's journal and ends up in a part of the novel's setting that corresponds to it, Caywood's Pond—the novel's equivalent of “in country.”

By experiencing the corruption all around her at the Hughes's farm and the stink of mortality in her father's diary, Sam has opened herself up to another level of understanding, though her reaction to that experience is to reject it. During the much discussed Caywood's Pond episode, she experiences the same sorts of things and once again recoils from the experience, though her recoiling suggests something of an advance in her development. She goes to the pond contradictorily to run away from this perception of life's complicity and to experience what Emmett and the other vets did in Vietnam. From Sam's first perceptions of her surroundings, to her feeling threatened by an imagined rapist that turns out to be a raccoon, and to her encounter with Emmett, who finally “spills his guts” about his Vietnam experience and his survivor's guilt, Caywood's Pond is the very image of one side of the novel's primary set of oppositions. It is the feminine and indeterminant; it is a murky place that undermines expectations. It is the unknown realm over which the engineers, like the military in Vietnam, are trying to exert control by building a boardwalk as a public approach to it and “dredging the outer reaches of its swamp” (208).

Kinney, for one, has argued that Sam discovers the limitations of her gender here, the impossibility of her ever understanding the Vietnam experience (45–46). Perhaps that is true, but indisputably the pond promotes a breakdown of the simplistic categories by which she has been operating—women do not kill, and only men murder babies, for example. What sounds like an approaching attacker is only a mother raccoon with its babies; the V.C. rapist-terrorist ends up being Emmett. Her musings, moreover, offer interesting formations of the oppositions we have seen. “The quality of dawn,” she thinks, “was different from the quality of dusk. Dusk lingered, and went through stages of dimness, but dawn was swift and pervasive. There must be some scientific principle behind that, she thought” (216). Verbally relating to her friendship with Dawn, this musing also displays the tension between a swift, clear closure and an ending that lingers, that remains so long indeterminant, as is the case with the Vietnam War in American society. Also, her own way of thinking is to make an advance on a telling metaphorical perception and then to close it off with a linear, masculine, “scientific principle.” During the rapid sunrise, Sam sees glowing rays “like the ones in Aunt Bessie's Upper Rooms. Sam didn't think there was any upper room. Life was here and now. Her father was dead, and no one cared” (216). Sam seeks absolutes and in so doing careens from the upper to the lower rooms and back again: “She had survived. But she didn't know what to do. She wished that bird would come. If the bird came, then she would leave” (216).

Characterizing her visit to Caywood's Pond as the male act of “humping the boonies,” she here positions herself as the passive female to be rescued by the transcendent bird—another version of the fantasy involved in Springsteen's “Dancing in the Dark.” In keeping with the novel's play of oppositions, however, her passivity is also that of the soldiers in Vietnam waiting for the “bird,” the chopper, to bring them cigarettes or to lift them out of their vulnerability. In other words, her experience in Caywood's Pond might emphasize the limitations of her gender but it also suggests that the experience of the soldiers in Vietnam was in some profound way a feminine one. Even an apparently random observation about her car becomes part of this flurry of new perceptions, some of which suggest advancement from her oppositional thought. Returning from the swamp to her car with Emmett, Sam notices that the VW's windows had mist on them: “The car inside seemed damp and cool. It must not be watertight, after all” (219). Sam's mechanism of flight from complicity, from corruptibility, from Hopewell is itself flawed, vulnerable—a waterbird and no more.

Those kinds of images emerging from Sam's observations reoccur as well in the emotional exchange she has with Emmett and in her response to that exchange. For Emmett the exchange marks his own involvement in life's complicity, something from which he has been trying to shelter himself. Reading Sam's angry note and thinking that perhaps she might harm herself, Emmett hurries after her to Caywood's Pond. In so doing he expresses his attachment to another; and in opening up to Sam about one of his horrifying war experiences and his postwar psychological struggles, he begins to make advances on the psychological barriers he has built. Importantly, though, the way in which he expresses his difficulties and the details Sam notices about him once again develop the play of oppositions within and behind the characters' perceptions of themselves.

Sam has already tried to figure out why Emmett always looks for the bird. The key for her is the old Beatles' lyrics: “‘I'm fixing a hole where the rain gets in / And stops my mind from wandering.’ That was what Emmett was doing with his hole, trying to stop the rain. If he concentrated on something fascinating and thrilling, like birds soaring, the pain of his memories wouldn't come through. His mind would be full of birds. Just birds and no memories. Flight” (139). In Sam's formulation, Emmett tries to make his mind as watertight as Sam thought her Volkswagon would be. Obviously, Emmett's “opening up” to Sam at Caywood's Pond displays his lack of success: like the Volkswagon, his mind is not watertight after all, but is subject to the rain, to the low lying dampness of emotion and involvement in the lives of others, in spite of all its attempts at pristine flight. At Caywood's Pond, Emmett formulates his concern with the egret in this way:

If you can think about something like birds, you can get outside of yourself, and it doesn't hurt as much. That's the whole idea. That's the whole challenge for the human race. Think about that. Put your thinking cap on, Sam. Put that in your pipe and smoke it! But I can barely get to the point where I can be a self to get out of.

(226, emphasis added)

The prevailing imagery in the novel of holes, depressions, and murky areas requires us to recognize the pun on “whole,” though, of course, Emmett does not. In terms of that imagery, the problem of getting outside the self (the self in this work is container) via flight is in fact “the whole challenge for the human race.” However, the novel's proposed solution to that problem is not escape from involvement. There is no solution, in fact, beyond recognition and acceptance of the challenge. Importantly, “whole” here suggests collectivism as well as essentialism; and it also plays with the notion of “in c(o)untry,” suggesting that the challenge is a gendered one.

The following exchange supports this suggestion. Emmett tells Sam that perhaps his coming to Caywood's Pond to think that he could save her is futile; she's got to learn for herself: “You can't learn from the past. The main thing you learn from history is that you can't learn from history. That's what history is” (226). To the extent that Sam is trying to learn about herself through understanding the stories of her father, Emmett, and Tom, the feminist/new-historical view of history as “his-story” is particularly appropriate here. Moreover, that reading applies to Emmett himself—a scarred veteran who, not knowing “how to wipe his butt” (171), went off to fight in response to the great unspoken demands of “his-story.” The metaphorical nature of Emmett's observations also underscores this view: as Emmett waves “at the dark swamp,” he says, “There are some things you can never figure out” (226). That view contrasts with the one projected by the attempts at draining and containing the swamp of Caywood's Pond, the novel's version of the murky, unknowable feminine and the foreignness of “in country.”

As is particularly typical of the characters in this novel (though in the strictest terms it is true of all fictional characters), the language that Emmett speaks conveys far more than he can imagine: it connects with the entire fabric of verbal suggestions that have accumulated throughout the work. Thus the meanings that occur during this episode do so in excess of Emmett's awareness. Though he serves as a vehicle for expressing authorial values—embracing oppositions, acknowledging the impossibility of a neat closure even while seeking that closure, rethinking neat gender boundaries—he does not embrace them. As cryptic explicator of Caywood's Pond, he represents something between the extreme directions of certainty and escape on the one hand and confusion and myopic involvement on the other. He is beginning to take on the “whole challenge,” even though he remains unaware of the implications of that pun. Clearly, however, Emmett serves as a marker for Sam's negotiation between the work's oppositions. In her response to Emmett, she both accepts him as a complicit, struggling human and, through her implicit reconstruction of him, dismisses his struggle as something to transcend. As Emmett turns and walks away from Sam back to the car, he is pictured as earthbound, poison ivy curling around his shoes. Sam has two diametrically opposed perceptions of him: “From the back, he looked like an old peasant woman hugging a baby. Sam watched as he disappeared into the woods. He seemed to float away, above the poison ivy, like a pond skimmer, beautiful in his flight” (226). Her immediate view makes of him a vulnerable, nurturing, complicit figure. However, once he disappears, leaving her imagination less tethered to what her eyes see, he becomes a figure of freedom—unencumbered, uncomplicated, beautiful. The pond skimmer remains above the “poison ivy” (emphasis added) and all that is suggested by its “V”—Vietnam, vets, Venus, involvement.

Following the episode at Caywood's Pond, the trip to the nation's capital swamp, Washington D.C., and the partially embedded, V-shaped wings of the Vietnam War Memorial clearly continue this negotiation through oppositions. As I have explained earlier, the memorial symbolizes a harmonizing energy. It expresses both sides of the oppositions we have been examining, and the episode of which it is the center emphasizes collectivity, cooperation, and inclusion. For Emmett the visit represents a third productive excursion, the vets dance in Hopewell and his going after Sam to Caywood's Pond being the first two. Certainly the visit will not solve all his problems, as Stewart, in criticizing the novel's incomplete and unrealistic treatment of veterans, suggests it is intended to do (175–79). It simply displays Emmett's having been transformed for a moment. Instead of fixedly staring at some distant, unknowable image of transcendence, of uninvolved flight, he sits “cross-legged in front of the wall” (245) looking at the names engraved low on the panel. His engagement is transformative, if only for a moment: “slowly his face bursts into a smile like flames” (245). The description suggests clearly that Emmett has found the bird he has been looking for. To that extent the novel achieves at least a symbolic closure by suturing together oppositions. This bird is not the pristine, white egret in flight above the confusion of “in country.” It is rather a reflection of Emmett's own movement toward engagement in life—in his past and future—something more akin to what the image of the egret with the water buffalo implies. He has flown toward involvement. Even the imagery of explosion and burning undergoes a transformation. The image of a napalm bomb bursting on an inscrutable landscape communicates the forcefulness of Emmett's recollections. Of course, at the same time, the image inscribes upon his face the horror of which he was a part. The description of Emmett's face also picks up on and transforms the image of burning in the novel's epigram from Springsteen's “Born in the U.S.A.”: “I'm ten years burning down the road / Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go.” Here expressing the veteran's alienation from society as endless, pointless flight, the image at the end of this novel suggests a sense of completion, the urge to burn down the road having led to the memorial (placed but seeming also to extend endlessly underground) and having emerged in the form of a communicative smile like flames.²

To an audience concerned primarily with Mason's realistic depiction of the Vietnam War veterans' postwar struggles, this ending might strike them as being just as contrived as any made-for-TV ending (Stewart 177, Melling, 55), even if they know that a visit to the memorial is often a standard part of the therapy that vets undergo (Scruggs). But understanding the ending requires a recognition of how thoroughly the novel is invested in the play of the oppositional imagery. Valorizing the mimetic level of the work to the exclusion of the symbolic, in fact, leads one to turn the novel—a written, evocative document—into a movie, whether a made-for-TV one or not. Interestingly, the entire Vietnam display in Washington D.C. expresses that very conflict between the representational and symbolic; it is almost as if Mason has written the opposition into her work. On the one hand, the Vietnam War Memorial, an abstraction, though with some representational hints, spreads out across and against low-lying ground. On the other hand, the statue of the GIs, clearly a representational piece, stands on higher ground than that holding the wall.

As with Emmett, so with Sam, the closing episode expresses a final, tenable negotiation between oppositions. In doing so, it develops the images of flight/groundedness that we have seen working throughout the novel, and especially in the Caywood's Pond episode. The appearances of those images, as I have suggested throughout, activate a variety of opposing ideologies related to gender relations, reproduction, war, taste in literature and entertainment, and modes of thinking. The episode at the wall begins with Sam fixing on a sentence that pops into her head: “Nobody here but us chickens” (237). It occurs to her as she anticipates seeing all the dead names on the monument—“it's just names.” The sentence about chickens expresses two things at once: that humans are insignificant, appearing finally as a bunch of names on a wall; and that they also intimately share the same experience: “Just us and the planet Earth and the nuclear bomb. But that's O.K., she thinks now. There is something comforting about the idea of nobody here but us chickens. It's so intimate. Nobody here but us. Maybe that's the point” (237–38). Again, the novel's themes are built upon what is almost an animal fable. This time, however, Sam is slightly more aware than she was in the “ant episodes” of the implications of the language that speaks through her, as she comes close to recognizing herself as a part of others.

During her visit to the wall, the image of chickens marks a further advance on that awareness. When a group of school kids walks by the wall as noisily “as chickens,” Sam becomes upset at one of them because she asks silly questions: “Are they piled on top of each other?” and “What are all these names anyway?” (240). Initially, Sam responds as if she were superior to, and different from, the kids. She continues the attitude that caused her to take up running—“it set her apart from the girls at school who did things in gabby groups, like ducks” (75): “Sam feels like punching the girl in the face for being so dumb. How could anybody that age not know?” Immediately, however, she recognizes what she shares with the kids: “But she realizes that she doesn't know either. She is just beginning to understand. And she will never know what happened to all these men in the war” (240). Again the image of the chicken modifies the sense of superiority suggested by the pristine, flying egret and by the planes that fly over the monument.³ However undignified and inglorious a creature it is, the chicken—that grounded bird—symbolizes the kind of mediation of oppositions that Mason advocates throughout the work.

A man's response to the yellow highlighting of names on the wall continues the implications of that episode. The narrator describes the highlighting as having resulted from someone coloring the names with a yellow magic marker, “the way Sam used to mark names and dates, important facts, in her textbooks” (241). Behind Sam the man says: “Somebody must have vandalized it … Can you imagine the sicko who would do that?” A woman responds: “No, …. Somebody just wanted the names to stand out and be noticed. I can go with that” (241). That exchange amounts to a gendered confrontation over the proper way to respond to a text, especially because it is introduced by a description of what Sam used to do with her textbooks and because it occurs only two pages after a description of the Washington Monument as “a beaming pencil against the sky” and, in Sam's recollection of Tom's words, “a big white prick” (238). The male response advocates respect and minimal interaction, an impersonal text-centered approach: only “a sicko” could have wanted to annotate it. Taking more of a reader-centered approach, the woman accepts another's response, appreciating the reader's need to emphasize some element of the text in a subjective way. For the man, the wall should stand by itself as some ultimate truth; for the woman, truth lies also in the response visitors have to the wall. The man takes the distanced, superior view Sam first has of the ignorant schoolkids, “noisy as chickens.” The woman sees herself as one of the chickens, as part of a collective enterprise.⁴

The woman's undercutting of the man's approach to the text/memorial emphasizes the kind of inclusiveness and sense of complicity that Sam is just developing. When she waits for Emmett and Mamaw to find her father's name on the monument she “imagines the egret patrolling for ticks on a water buffalo's back, ducking and snaking its head forward, its beak like a punji stick” (242). The water buffalo-egret symbol reappears; and the definitiveness of its reappearance as a sign of Sam's more integrated character is marked by the metaphorically rich response Emmett gives to the park guide who asks them if they need help: “‘We know where we are, Emmett says. ‘Much obliged, though” (242). What's more, this final episode reconfigures Sam's “relationship” with Springsteen, whose Born in the U.S.A. album she has earlier purchased at a Maryland shopping mall. When Sam climbs the ladder to view her father's name, Springsteen goes up because of her: she climbs with “the record package in her hand” (243). She rises above the ground not because some hero has rescued her, not through flight, but through trying to connect with her past, a process of excavation almost, as is suggested by her viewing her father's name scratched on the wall as “something for future archaeologists to puzzle over” (244). The fact that she discovers her own name, Sam A. Hughes, on the wall emphasizes her growing sense of involvement in others and the collective experience that Mason builds here. Sam touches her own name and feels that “all the names in America have been used to decorate this wall” (245).⁵ Moreover, her name helps to decorate a structure whose form embraces oppositions: wings in, not flying away from, a (w)hole in the ground.

As exhilarating and tonally complex as this ending is, however, it remains problematic, and not because, as Stewart argues, it unsuccessfully layers a symbolic conclusion over a realistic treatment of the plight of veterans (167, 176–77). Part of the problem, I think, relates to the collection of emotions about Vietnam that the novel activates. As a regrettable and unclear endeavor, the war raises questions about beginning and ending, about opening and closing. When did it begin? When did it end? (Is the answer suggested by the trip of Sam, Emmett, and Mrs. Hughes to Washington, D.C., via Interstate 64 in a '73 beetle?) Mason captures those feelings through the veterans she constructs, men trying to carry on with their civilian lives but incapable of leaving the war behind, not just because of the powerful experience of war in general but because of the sense that the Vietnam War is still unfinished business. Mason writes that issue into her work also by repeatedly offering details suggesting problematic closure: Sam's incomplete diploma (200), her incomplete sexual encounter with Tom (127), the problem with “the post ignition shut off jet” in Lonnie's van (25, 185), and of course all the references to “delayed stress syndrome” are just several of the dozens of examples.⁶ Arguably the novel's principal theme is the disillusioning promise of clarity held out by all boundaries—whether high school graduation, the return home from a war, or the visit to “the wall.” Curiously, the novel establishes a boundary; it ends by valorizing a lack of clear distinction: Sam gains a sense of belonging and identity that paradoxically makes her a chicken within a flock, part of the collection of Americans whose names are engraved upon the wall; and the symbolic catalyst for the ending is the wall, which, as Mrs. Hughes says, “don't show up good.” What's more, the novel comes to a well-prepared symbolic closure, one that embraces difference, and yet it has also established a sense of lives to be continued, the lives of Sam and Emmett to be individually improved by this communal, funereal experience at the wall. Mason has in a sense prepared the reader for this experience, if not preempted criticism of it, by writing the problematics of endings—and of this novel's ending—into episode after episode and detail after detail. However, in the case of Sam, the ending does turn upon itself in a troubling way.

Emmett, Sam, and Mrs. Hughes visit Irene in Lexington on their way to Washington, D.C. At Irene and Larry's house, Sam does three important things: she gives her mother the ceramic cat she has decorated; she tells her that she has decided to attend the University of Kentucky in the fall; and she gets a glimpse of what will be her bedroom when she lives in Lexington with her mother and father-in-law. A “foray into the Sixties,” according to Dwyer, the ceramic cat that Sam decorates with a gaudy collection of sequins and beads serves as a kind of peace offering from Sam (76–77). It also anticipates Sam's development. On the one hand, the cat evokes the apparent rebellion and individuality of the sixties—beads, psychedelic design, a flower sticking out of its coin slit, and of course, a discarded roach inside it. On the other hand it is, after all, a coin bank—the capitalistic foundation actually allowing the kinds of rebellion marking the sixties, even the capitalism to which most of the sixties generation, certainly Irene, ultimately returned. In terms of the animal fable tendencies of the novel, the decoration of the cat represents independence tamed, domesticated, subjected to custom. That is what has happened to Irene and what happens to Sam. For all its suggestions of rebellion in Sam's character—her affinity for black, her desire to shock expectations, her advocating abortion for Dawn—and for its implicit criticisms of the Washington Monument/pencil/phallus/pristine egret matrix and the “natural” distinctions that matrix supports, the novel finally offers a sense of lives continued that valorizes what it has interrogated throughout. Sam will go up to Lexington, where she will live in a room “painted pink, with a white bedspread” (232).⁷ Even the strong sense of meaning that she has on her visit to the wall rearranges the nontraditional sense of control that she has tried to assert over her own reproductive function: “Sam doesn't understand what she is feeling, but it is something so strong, it is like a tornado moving in her, something massive and overpowering. It feels like giving birth to this wall” (240). Thus, in spite of the convincing symbolic gestures of a mediation between oppositions—Sam, for instance, recognizes herself as both birth machine and soldier in this ending—the novel's mimetic plane finally defines Sam's growth as compliance. She develops because she finally feels the reproductive imperative, which only augments the sense of compliance signaled by a pink room and a life in Lexington, a site ostensibly marking intellectual growth but actually naming allegiance to the male domain of law, reading, and official writing.

Notes

1. Durham, Melling, and Morrissey all interpret the egret as a positive symbol, something at which Emmett should aim in order to avoid his fragmented existence.

2. White sees the novel not so much “issuing naturally from the epigraph” as “casing it” (76).

3. The ordinary marriage between Irene and Dwayne was accompanied by a display of chickens. Irene tells Sam, “He was a chicken farmer, and we got married on his porch. When we left, a bunch of chickens got loose and feathers were flying everywhere. They were Barred Rocks, I believe” (168).

4. Just prior to the exchange between the man and the woman, another brief exchange similarly exposes the limitations of males' “truth talk” as it relates to “relational” speech: “A little kid says, “Look, Daddy, the flowers are dying. The man snaps, ‘Some are and some aren't” (240). The kid, of course, is attempting more than an exact description of the state of the flowers, actually expressing in his own way something of his or her feelings about death. The man misses the point by thinking the statement has to make an accurate point—all this in the shadow of the pencil-like/“prick”-like Washington Monument. The man's response to his child also anticipates Sam's intolerant reaction to the girl's unaware questions about the wall.

5. June Dwyer analyzes this transformation from what she terms “old history” to “new history”: “What Sam does not understand is that she has armed herself with old historical expectations. She is looking for heroes and villains, strong leaders, clear causes. What she finds is new history—not a chain of command but a web of connections, not a patriarchy, but an extended family without a father figure at its head” (72).

6. Here are some other examples of how Mason writes this problem with closure into her novel: references to movie and TV remakes and continuations; the allusion to Donovan's lyric about a “beach that never ends”; the question discussed on Emmett's reappearance in Hopewell with Irene about how The Return of the Body Snatchers ends; the allusion to the ancient mariner's having to rehearse over and over again his story; the image of the Vietnamese mother carrying her dead baby around; the Hollys' marriage as being over but not finished; Pete's proposition that the Vietnam war could have been completed, won, if only the United States had paved the Ho Chi Minh Trail all the way to Hanoi; and even Col. Blake's memorable (for Sam, anyway) deathbed warning to Radar that if he doesn't behave he will “come back and kick his butt.”

7. Bates emphasizes the conventionality of gender roles in this “complacent work” (55). Booth, too, calls attention to the nurturing, fertility role for Sam, the female quester for the grail in the American wasteland of the novel (109). Carton, on the other hand, takes the birth metaphor at the novel's end as a signal of Sam's “part in the process of social reproduction,” not of her capitulation to the passive function of biological reproduction (316). Ryan offers a fascinating argument: Sam discovers “a postmodernist authority, finally adopts a critical position that denies the existence of Logos, the complete, male, central authority (200). Though she does approach the views Ryan ascribes to her, I am arguing that Sam finally decides to adopt Logos as her authority, just as Mason does, despite her novel's involvement in “popular culture.”

Works Cited

Bates, Milton J. “Men, Women and Vietnam.” America Rediscovered: Critical Essays on Literature and Film of the Vietnam War. Ed. Owen W. Gilman and Lorrie Smith. New York: Garland, 1990. 27–63.

Booth, David. “Sam's Quest, Emmett's Wound: Grail Motifs in Bobbie Ann Mason's Portrait of America after Vietnam.” Southern Literary Journal 23 (1991): 98–109.

Carton, Evan. “Vietnam and the Limits of Masculinity.” American Literary History 3 (1991): 294–318.

Durham, Sandra Bonilla. “Women and War: Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country,” Southern Literary Journal 22 (1990): 45–52.

Dwyer, Jane. “New Roles, New History and New Patriotism: Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.” Modern Language Studies 22 (1992): 722–78.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. Macmillan, 1998.

Jason, Philip, ed. Fourteen Landing Zones: Approaches to Vietnam War Literature. Iowa City: Iowa UP, 1991.

Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Viet Nam War. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Kinney, Katherine. “‘Humping the Boonies: Sex, Combat, and the Female in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country.” Jason, 38–48.

Mason, Bobbie Ann. In Country. New York: Harper, 1986.

Melling, Philip H. Vietnam in American Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Morrissey, Thomas J. “Mason's In Country. Explicator 50 (1991): 62–64.

Ryan, Barbara T. “Decentered Authority in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country. Critique 31 (1990): 199–212.

Scruggs, Jan. Interview. Diane Rehm Show. WAMU, Washington, DC, 29 May 1995.

Stewart, Matthew C. “Realism, Verisimilitude, and the Depiction of Vietnam Veterans in In Country,” Jason, 166–79.

White, Leslie. “The Function of Popular Culture in Bobbie Ann Mason's Shiloh and In Country.” Southern Quarterly 26 (1998): 69–79.