Loss and the Durability of Everyday Life in Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country
The first-person narrator of Uwe Timm's In My Brother's Shadow and Samantha Hughes, main character in Bobbie Ann Mason's In Country, encounter life-changing peripeteias long before they reach adulthood. They both focus on young men whom they never knew through direct experience. These men are fallen soldiers and at age of 19 their deaths are not only violent, but premature and tragic. Upon reaching a resolve to know more about their own lives Timm's narrator and Samantha Hughes explore lives of these figures who would have otherwise played a significant role in their lives. The protagonists of these novels investigate Karl-Heinz Timm and Dwayne Hughes through time from panoptic view of present. Uwe Timm examines familial memories and relics of his significantly older brother killed on eastern front in October of 1943. Mason depicts an adolescent, born in October 1966 now almost majority age who never knew her father because he was killed in Vietnam one month before her birth. Both protagonists refer to themselves as an afterthought (Timm 4; Mason 184). In their own eyes they are low in family hierarchy. The latency of their willingness to face past and ask questions leads to processing their familial losses indirectly through memories and stories of others. Even though these novels are about very different moments in history, different nations, cultures, and acts of war they possess noteworthy similarities. Timm's book is profoundly autobiographical; he writes about his family. Bobbie Ann Mason's novel is a work of realistic fiction and set in her native Western Kentucky. Even with these differences both books are motivated by desire for knowledge about a lost parental figure (Timm's brother is his godfather and 16 years his elder), expressed uselessness of history books for this knowledge (Timm 88, and Mason 48 and 187), as well as centrality of family pictures, letters, and diaries as vestiges of deceased. Information abounds but it is cryptic and contributes to an obstinate sense of mystery as much as it fills in picture of who these young men were. Another common feature of these books, besides focus on loss, is centrality of everyday life. In My Brother's Shadow and In Country demonstrate how absence caused by state-mandated violence exerts an enduring presence of a lost family member on routines and habits that define daily existence of novels' protagonists and their families. These novels articulate a drubbing and tenacious emotional uncertainty due to persistent presence of absent person in memories of others and emotional voids that they feel. We encounter a paradox in an expression such as presence of loss, or presence of an absence, but this paradox affords both narratives tenor of eulogies situated in everyday living. This essay examines junctures of daily living and loss in order to reveal uneasy resonance that manifests itself between permanence of loss and durability of practices of everyday life. Timm and Mason make loss visible in preparation of food, in distractions of reading and watching TV, having parties, in innocuous self-destructive moments of rebellion, earning money, going shopping, and ultimately recognizing geography of loss whether it is located in Ukraine or entails visiting Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C. Axiomatic to both stories is experience of what Marianne Hirsch has called or the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose belated stories are evacuated by stories of previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated (Hirsch 22). Inherent to Hirsch's concept is reality that those remembered, due to dyssynchronous lives, offer recipients of postmemory no opportunity for a direct emotional or psychological attachment. …