Curtis White, "Combat"


1. Why is this story broken into numbered segments? How does this form complement the themes and preoccupations of the narrative? What does it mean that the intertextuality of "real life" and television serial seems to work both ways (i.e., the narrator imagines his "real life" relationship to his father through the serial, but he also imagines that some of the characters in the serial imagine themselves through "real life"--for example, "these nameless men who are brought in fresh for each episode so that they might die from their nameless fears and from the tragic knowledge of their function in the Combat world")? How does this intertextuality relate to the narrator’s question "Is a metaphor a delusion?"

2. Why does the narrator choose to tell this memoir/story of his father through an episode of a 1960s television series? What does it tell you about the relationship between the narrator and his father? What makes this particular episode of Combat "the perfect episode for [the narrator’s] purposes"?

3. In the second section of the story, the narrator contrasts the historical effect of German weaponry, which was "feared and envied," and their function in Combat, which was "merely to roar up full of the empty ostentation of late-Wagnerian opera, and be promptly converted to something more like the discarded shells of cicadas." Look at the other places in the story where the "realism" of the television series’ depiction of war is questioned (e.g., the machine gun fire, which always "hits exactly an inch below the preserving limit of the tree," or the continuing characters "off whom German bullets, grenades and mortars bounce like popcorn"). Why are these fictions necessary? How are they connected to the patriotic subtexts or messages of the show, for example, the "thesis" that "America won World War II because of baseball"? Or to the "disturbing truths" observed by the narrator in sections 22 and 23?