Danger, Fear, and Violence

The short story’s temporal backdrop instigates the author’s explorations of danger, fear, and violence. Although the narrator is relaying his story years after it took place, he is detailing the events surrounding WWII and therefore describing how the conflict impacted his life. Throughout the majority of the short story, the war lives at the margins of the narrative and therefore in the periphery of the narrator’s consciousness. The narrator insists that he and his family “never talked about the war as such” (403). Therefore, the narrator avoids discussing the war in an overt manner throughout the majority of the narrative. However, evidence of the war dictates much of the narrator’s experience. Not only do “the Germans [trundle] up the little main street, knocking plaster and even stone off the corners of the old buildings,” but the German cars destroy the...