clb322 Assessment 1, Reading Reflection 3

Reading Reflection #3 Interchapter V11 by Ernest Hemingway
Interchapter V11 is a short story from In our Time by Ernest Hemingway, published in 1925. The text describes a battle. The narrative point of view has been used to great effect to imagine the scene and the frame of mind (Moon 2007, 97). The central character I believe is the soldier who clings to life and hope in a mud soaked trench during an artillery bombardment. There was group discourse discussing how God to their reading viewpoint is the central character. The western front alone had more than 9,500km of trenches. He continually prays throughout the bombardment of his trench to Jesus to keep him alive. He promises that he will be stronger in his faith and tell everyone that Jesus is the only one that matters. The shelling moves on and the soldier assists in repairing the trench. He doesn’t mention his desperate prayers or promises to his troops or the prostitute he spends the following night with.
This short story follows a conventional plot structure (Moon 2007, 24). Beginning with the trench scene; the rising action of the shelling and the climax of the desperate battlefield prayers. The clean up and ending with the resolution of broken promises. Longman (Lecture, 2010) states that a short story can be widely varied but always a singular focus from which it derives its power of attaining and keeping the reader’s attention.
Reading and rereading this text encourages the reader to follow the traditional approach to character study and view the people as real and to hold them morally accountable for their actions. The way that I view these characters inclusive of my cultural and literary repertoire is of a man who grew up in western society, where religion does not play a big role in general affairs but is something you may turn to in desperation for we cannot say categorically that amazing events don’t occur and the use of legal brothels while frowned upon is certainly not illegal. The way that you view these characters plays a strong part in your personal reading position and your opinion of the soldier and the woman.
This story was written six years after the end of WW1 and the implied reader I believe is a returned serviceman. This short story I believe fills both theories of an implied reader as far as the narrator speaks to you as the reader in the reliving of memories and the target audience as discussed earlier is a returned serviceman. I encountered and read this story with a particular context, and within this context of my cultural background, life experiences and cultural discourse I have formed a large part of my life on. I am a returned serviceman and whilst I have not seen the horrors of trench warfare, I have seen innocent people die needlessly and soldiers on both sides die in battle. Opinions on the woman in the group reading were that she was marginalised and her only purpose is to satisfy the soldiers’ yearnings. We have seen in the media firsthand what happened at Abu Ghraib by soldiers of both sexes who had no release from their reality with cases of abuse and torture.
Hemingway emphasises the fact that he did not tell the woman, this implies quite truthfully that the women in the Villa Rossa were sounding boards for the men and played a large role that was not just of a sexual nature. However to a resistant reader, she would be seen only as a sexual object to satisfy the soldiers’ carnal needs in challenging dominant cultural beliefs (Moon 2007, 130)
My personal repertoire assisted in forming my dominant perspective that the soldier could not tell his fellow soldiers of his fears and emotions for worry of being ridiculed. A young soldier I knew died in Darwin on exercise from heat stroke when attempting a 15 kilometre pack march, due to the fact that he was intimidated to speak up and looking weak and unmanly. They also enabled me to believe that he did pray and promise a course of action to Jesus upon the proviso of living as I have actually made promises in prayer which have not been kept.
Moon (2007, 100) describes Polysemy as the words and symbols can have varied meanings. Polysemy has played a role in the text with survival delivered, and the sin of taking a prostitute after promising Jesus of his service upon survival. That ideology and the resultant hypocrisy could be the reason he does not tell anybody as much as his protection of his masculinity. The semiotic analysis of the Villa Rossa as a church and the prostitute as a priest is also hidden in the text. We assume he went upstairs to have sex, but that is based on our cultural beliefs. It is also believable that he went upstairs, collapsed in tears at the fact that he couldn’t bring himself to talk of his miracle.
The teaching strategies I would use for this story are think, pair and share about their views on the soldier and how the ending has impacted on those thoughts. Rewriting the text to having the soldier tells his fellow troops and not visiting the brothel and how that can form different opinions.

Jahn, Manfred. (1996). Windows of focalization: Deconstructing and reconstructing a narratological concept. Style, 30(2), 241-267. Retrieved September 16, 2010, from Academic Research Library. (Document ID: 10574822).

Jetnikoff, A. (2010). Lecture on Conventions and the Unconvential (with reference to genres and intertextuality). Sep 8th, Queensland University of Technology.

Kim, J.. (2008). A ROMANCE WITH NARRATIVE INQUIRY: Toward an Act of Narrative Theorizing. Curriculum and Teaching Dialogue, 10(1/2), 251-267,304. Retrieved September 16, 2010, from ProQuest Education Journals. (Document ID: 1666787361).
Moon, B. (2007). Literary Terms, A Practical Glossary (2nd ed.). Western Australia: PK Print

I was trying to think of what goes through your mind in this situation and all I can think of is nothing and everything. You work out where the enemy is; the best way to attack and you are mindful of your ammo supply. It is only when you are trapped as the soldier finds himself in Interchapter V11 that you think of dying and only then do you pray to live.