I’m hoping to take a breather soon enough so that we can reflect on some aspects of the novel. Certainly I’d like to write something about Barry’s narration: its use of dialect, its lyricism, and thinking more broadly about omniscient and free indirect narration. The character of Willie, of course. Historical context, too, which still I’m somewhat shaky on, as the previous post admitted, and am currently trying to rectify by reading Diarmaid Ferriter’s fascinating history, ‘A Nation, and Not a Rabble’. All kinds of things suggest themselves. Onwards we must go, however, if we’re to get this book completed by exam-time.
Summary— Chapter Five
Willie’s battalion is on rotation from the front and, billeted in the French city of Amiens, he is finally given a few days of free time behind the lines.
Willie and Pete O’Hara decide to hit the town and are guided to a well-liked estaminet for private soldiers. They quickly get very drunk there. Willie’s head spins as he drinks away memories of Captain Pasley and Gretta.
He and O’Hara dance with two women who lead them both down into a basement. Willie, extremely drunk, finds that he is being propositioned by a prostitute. He is at first abashed by the woman’s approach: O’Hara, less naïve than his friend, quickly begins to have sex with the woman he entered with. Willie gives himself to the woman with wonder and lust, and thus loses his virginity. He falls asleep and, when he awakens with a headache, O’Hara tells him it is time to go. As they leave Willie notices a rash on the thigh of the woman O’Hara has slept with. They make their way back to their billet through the city night.
Willie, still working in the support trenches, writes a long letter to Gretta. He tells her he is now in a quiet sector of the front, though the weather is now icy. Though this is a longer letter, it has the same structure as his previous missive: Willie writes in careful detail telling of his life at the front, and ends with an outpouring of passionate declarations of love for her. He continues to have trouble ending his letters satisfactorily. As he writes, a wish to confess about his night with the prostitute weighs on him.
O’Hara, it transpires, contracts a sexually transmitted disease from his tryst with the prostitute. It seems that Willie, luckily, does not.
Willie’s company finds itself rotated back into the front line again. It remains a quiet sector. One day he is drinking tea in a corner of the trench when a soldier new to the front, a Private Byrne, carelessly lifts his head above the line of the parapet. He is shot in the eye: blood gruesomely jets from the wound. Willie wants to ignore the incident at first but then attends to the young man.
He is struck by his own uselessness in the face of this violence. The young man is tormented for hours as they wait for the medical corps to arrive. Willie responds to the incident with cold despair; he has become hardened by the war. He reflects that the youth would be better shot dead on the spot. His own anguish, however, tells of the compassion struggling to be expressed within him.
A few weeks later, rotated back behind the lines again, Christy Moran has good news for Willie. He has been given home leave for a few days. Delighted for the younger man, he pleads with Willie to stay alive until then.
Questions
A short but interesting chapter. Willie’s willie at last sees action and, unscathed, lives to see another day. Then a gruesome moment in the line conveys just how unexpected death could be in the trenches.
“But he liked the bolts to be loosened on his concerns like any other soldier” (p. 60). Research the world of the First World War estaminet. In what ways is the estaminet somewhere where soldiers could escape the war and the norms and disciplines of respectable society? In what ways does the estaminet attempt to reproduce something approximating a conventional or ‘normal’ life for the soldiers?
“Maybe there was a poison in this tepid water” (p. 61). What does this line suggest about the effect of the war upon Willie? In this chapter we find more examples of the way in which the war is beginning to take a psychological toll on Willie. From the moment when Willie’s hands begin to shake at the thought of the deaths of the men on the supply line (p.30), there are signs of Willie’s developing neurotic response to the war. Trace a timeline of these—noting where he displays significant signs of, for example, anxiety, depression, paranoia, anger and dissociation in response to events around him.
As the stupefied Willie gazes at the prostitute who offers herself to him, his response to her is revealing: “Thick, thick black hair like a smudge of night she had, and clear, clever eyes the colour of dark blue feathers in a magpie. My God, he thought, she was like a Goddess. She seemed to Willie more beautiful than any woman he had ever seen. ‘Money for fuck?’ she said.” (p.62). What does Willie’s metaphorical language about the woman before him reveal about his feelings and attitudes towards women (A-level students may find their previous study in Love Through the Ages useful here, in particular ideas informing the Courtly Love Convention)? In what ways is there a gap between Willie’s understanding of the transaction taking place in this scene and that of the young woman? Barry uses a technique known as intentional anticlimax at the end of this passage. What effect does this have on the reader?
“Why you call Willie?” said the beautiful girl, giggling” (p. 63). It’s a good question. Can you think why Sebastian Barry named his hero Willie?
There is an obvious hypocrisy in Willie and O’Hara’s actions, one that catches up with O’Hara when he catches an sexually transmitted disease and needs to see a nurse. “Oh, yeh, that’s great Willie, I’ll go and bring this to the nurses. Nice Irish girls. They’ll only be thrilled” (p.66). Similarly Willie, in writing his long letter, “every inch of it thought should he say something about the fallen girl of Amiens?” (p.65). What does this sexual encounter say about the lives of men at the front and how they relate this life to that at home? How do you judge Willie and O’Hara’s time at the estaminet?
“There needed to be a new sort of line officer like a veterinarian, he thought, because there was too much of this screaming and suffering. There was too much of it, too much of it, and it wasn’t love or anything close to it to leave a young fella screaming on the ground for three hours. It wasn’t love and it wasn’t even like being at a war and it wasn’t fucking right” (p.68). Follow the logic of Willie’s argument here. Is this a reasoned or an emotional argument? Indeed, is it an argument at all? Barry’s use of structure and language in this passage is revealing. What does it tell us about Willie’s state of mind?
I thought this an interesting chapter that developed Willie’s character. I’m warming to Willie a little, vacant though he often seems. Willie’s loss of virginity is another episode in his gradual disenchantment at the front, the loss of his innocence. The hardening of his attitude to the injured youth at the end of the chapter seemed a logical extension of this growth within him of “cold despair” (p.68). I felt the juxtaposition of the two encounters was clever by Barry—and I’m sure that the latter event, so revealing of Willie’s anguish, moved me in part because of the author’s clever use of structure.
Move Him Into The Sun 