FREE ESSAY ON "IN COUNTRY" BY BOBBIE ANN MASON

"IN COUNTRY" BY BOBBIE ANN MASON

In Country
In the novel "In Country" by Bobbie Ann Mason, we find the story of a young girl who
struggles in life to find out about her father and the history of the Vietnam War.
Throughout the book, the reader finds out that this girl, Sam Hughes, is not your every
day teenager. She is faced with the responsibility of dealing with her unmotivated uncle
and a boyfriend she really doesn't care for anymore. She's confronted with the fact that
she really knows nothing about her father and the War he took part in. All of the people
she knows who were involved in Vietnam have been touched somehow by the war. What are
some of the things she learns from these people? What does she find out about herself and
about the father she has never even met? Sam's search for information about her father
and his War concludes instead with the discovery of herself. A step towards seeking out
the truth about a man who has been a phantom to her throughout her life becomes a step
towards helping her find the truth about herself.
In the beginning of the novel, Sam sees her father as something that can only be
contained in a picture. She tucks a picture of him into a mirror frame in her room and
tries to imagine what he could be like. However, the picture doesn't give her any answers
- "The soldier boy in the picture never changed. In a way that made him dependable. But
he seemed so innocent" (p 66). She struggles to imagine what it would be like trying to
tell her dad of all the things he had missed out on. Like a child talking to its stuffed
animals, she talks to the picture as if it were alive. " 'You missed Watergate,' Sam said
to the picture." (p. 67). She wants to make her father a more personal figure in her life
instead of just a photo she has seen hundreds of times before.
Television gives Sam another look at some situations that her dad must have faced in
Vietnam. It has the power to bring scenes of the war into her living room. Sam remembers
when her family bought its first color television set. Because her mom became upset when
Emmett told his war stories, TV was one of the things that fed Sam's imagination. She had
always relied on the pictures in her mind to help her see what Vietnam was like, but when
they got a TV, Vietnam became a real place to her for the very first time (p 51). She and
Emmett watch M*A*S*H episodes almost non-stop, and Sam makes an association between the
made-up drama and the real life battles. However, she realizes that these shows, while
appealing, are just fantasy. Although the TV death of Colonel Henry Blake seems more real
to her than the death of her own father (p. 25), the fact that she begins to explore the
historical events of Vietnam show that the television texts have failed to satisfy her
inner need. Even though she's far from discovering the truth, she's one step closer to
seeing who her father really was. However, she needs a more authentic and personalized
model.
Sam finds that more personal model in the veterans she talks to around Hopewell. In her
first encounters with the vets, however, she meets with a puzzling inability (or refusal)
to speak - "Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and
embarrassing" (p. 67). Even if the vets do talk about the war, their stories rarely mesh.
Some want to ignore the past - some want to glorify it. Some tell her to stop looking for
something she can never fully understand. Because their voices conflict, Sam feels that
they can't be held as reliable sources of the truth that she desires.
Another source of information about her dad is her family. Irene is hesitant to talk
about her first husband. First she tells Sam, "I was married to him for one month before
he left, and I never saw him again…I hardly even remember him" (p. 167). She also
displays some bitterness about the war and tells Sam not to make it out like it was a
happy time (p. 236). Emmett is also reluctant to talk, but he doesn't display the same
anger as her mom. He is silent because it's his way of loving Sam and protecting her. He
tells her, "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" (p. 226). Sam's grandparents, on
the other hand, are generous with their memories of their son. Their recollections show
the inescapable force of desire in narrative, for they speak of a son they are proud to
remember even though that might not be how he perceived himself. Sam recognizes that
their loving memory and Irene's negation result in a distorted representation. The
"facts" she obtains are corrupted by absence and ignorance. How, then, is she to find the
truth about her father?
Sam begins to unravel more to the mystery when her mother allows her to read her father's
letters. While reading the letters, Sam is filled with a sense of disappointment - partly
because he leaves out details that she believes are essential. She feels like he's hiding
something from her (p. 182). However, she realizes that the most likely reason for
keeping the details out of his letters is that he wants to protect Irene from the horrors
of the war. The letters are not complete, and therefore cannot be trusted as a absolute
value of truth.
A more complete version of the war and a more detailed look into the life of her father
is found in the diary her grandparents give her to read. She finds that her father is not
the Dwayne in the diary, not the same man she read about in the letters, nor is he the
same person she heard about from her family. Sam hopes that the diary will share more
personal insights, and it does just that. The diary exposes more about her father than
she could have ever wanted to know. In it, Dwayne reveals the soul-shattering experiences
from which he has shielded his family. Sam sees for the first time her father's fear,
hatred, confusion, ignorance; his companions, his smoking, drinking, and cursing, and she
finds it disturbing (pp. 201-205). This is not the man her grandparents remember: the one
who was so thoughtful and who never took a drink and never smoked (p.196). Nor is he the
heroic icon of her imagination. In fact, his diary disgusts her. She is ashamed of him
and even tells Emmett that she hates him (p. 221). She is shocked to find that the lost
and frustrated voice from the diary is the voice of her father. When Sam discovers that
her hero-father gives way to a frightened country boy, she recoils at what she thought
she had been seeking. Unable to believe in the father that had seemed to promise her
security and certainty, she feels spiritually and emotionally on her own.
As a result of this revelation, however, Sam now must consciously become her own
authority. She will validate her father's words by living it out in the real world. She
decides that the only way to truly know her father is, in Pete's words, to "hump the
boonies" (p. 136). She heads to Cawood's Pond to live the life portrayed in the diary. In
an attempt to affirm the voice of her father, she tries to follow in his footsteps. She
tries to understand through an encounter with what is real to her. Sam camps out in the
swamp to find her own reality. In one sense, she finally recognizes her own experience as
a useful standard of personal truth - the only truth there is.
What does Sam learn from her experiences in the swamp? She learns that she will never
really know her father - never really learn from him. The things that happened to her in
the swamp, while being real to her, were not what happened in Vietnam, no matter how hard
she tried to believe it. Yet as a result of her night on her own, Sam is even more aware
of her father and her loss. She's finally truly feeling his death for the first time
(p.229). Now, at long last, Sam is able to confront the truth of her loss, the authority
of her experience, and the effect that Vietnam had on her life. This is why she and
Emmett go to the War Memorial. She and her father share a surname. They are related, but
they are different, too. In her solitude, Sam has begun to realize the value of her
personal role in the production of meaning, truth, and self.