Hello blog readers,
For this week, I chose to read Cartucho by Nellie Campobello. This novel was quite interesting as it was composed of a bunch of small stories. Written through the perspective of a child, the young girl's name I could not pick up on, but through snapshots, I understood she was a young child who lived with her Mama during the revolution.
The central theme of the novel is the revolution. We heard many stories of soldiers, generals, and men who were executed as if it was an ordinary everyday occurrence, which at the time it was. However, there was no emphasis on the horror of the revolution because it was framed through the eyes of a child. Instead, there was a lot of mention of many deaths. For instance, "the assault left more than three hundred dead in El Aguila alone" (p 26), and "more than three hundred men shot all at once, inside a barracks, is really quite extraordinary, the people said, but our young eyes found it quite natural" (p. 32). These quotes stuck out to me because the numerous deaths are shown not even to faze these children. For them, I think they saw it as a meaningless game. They don't understand the pain of death. All they can see is that it looks like fun, and when people said things like "when he wanted to have fun, he practiced target shooting at hats of men who walked by on the street" (p. 7), they imagined shooting to be fun—making war a game that was played by the adults, shooting, laughing, and drinking. Thus, they were eager to see the games be played, as the novel states, "We girls were eager to see the men fall" (p.28).
Although the children saw it as a meaningless game, all these men died for the revolution. The concept of death may not seem as permanent to a kid, but we all understand it. I believe the daughter did not talk about it with as much tragedy because she was accustomed to the violence as it was all she had ever known. She would see what happened but not process it the way her Mama or an adult would. As adults, we are more sensitive to this topic and are more likely to mourn the loss. However, it does not mean the kids will forget about it, as these moments have been engraved in their memories forever. We know this as the story does not take place chronologically but instead follows through the story with her memories. She explains things as she remembers them, not by the constraints of history. These memories will remain ingrained in her head for much longer than the immediate moment they happened. For example, we see the quote, "I saw the place where Jose Beltran died. I didn't know why, or when, but I would never forget it (p.40).
This novel overall was fascinating to read. I learned a new perspective on the revolution and observed the violence differently than I usually would because of the child's perspective.
My question for everyone is, How do you think the book would differ if it took on another perspective, such as an adult or teenager?
"a meaningless game"
ReplyDeleteI wonder... do games not have meanings? Should they? Perhaps the problem is more translating meaningfulness between games... It means a lot in (say) hockey that a puck goes into the net, but this is meaningless in (say) chess. To put this another way: when you are outside the game, it seems meaningless (why are those goes skating around on the ice like that?); when you are inside, everything has heightened importance.
And is this not the same as a war or a revolution?
Hi Melika,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your insightful post! I especially appreciate your observation of the revolution as a sort of game to the children; this is a perspective I hadn't tapped into, but you're right - the narrator manages to maintain a relatively light tone throughout the novel, despite the heavy subject matter she is discussing. To answer your question, I think an older perspective would mean losing the playfulness of the child narrator. A teenager, for instance, is ruled by hormones I assume would be majorly exacerbated by the horrors of a revolution, and an adult would be too aware of their surroundings to hold onto the naivety of the young narrator's perspective.
Hi Melika! I really enjoyed reading your blog post and I thought your ideas and insights were super interesting! Your point about how the girls saw it as a "meaningless" game sparked some thought. Although the girls see it as meaningless, I believe they think this because they do not understand the game and its rules. They are outside of the game and find no point in it because they have never been introduced to the game. Just like how Jon said throwing a puck in a net is meaningful in hockey but meaningless in chess. I think that if the author wrote her memories with the perspective of a teenager/young adult she would miss the importance of games and play. As a young adult I do not see things as games like children do. The plot would be told in a different timeline as well, because her memories would be even more distorted as time has gone by. The details of the events of guts, and shooting would also be seen as painful and not a game because a teenager has had time to grasp the universality of death and grief. It would be a totally different book I think.
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