Essay Comparing Girl At War And Philip Roth's Plot Against America

Both Sara Novic’s Girl at War (2015) and Philip Roth’s Plot Against America (2004) are told from the perspective of a child. The narrators of these novels construct their own methods of understanding to grasp complex sociological issues. Inevitably, as children, their understanding of these issues are simplified to accommodate their capacity. Although, the mature audience of these novels understands the shortcomings of childish understanding, the authors use these perspectives to speak to our own constructed ideologies, which themselves inevitably fall short of encompassing complex sociological issues. By looking at the ways these child narrators compile their experience into their own incomplete understanding, we will see how the authors of …show more content…
Unable to comprehend, or even truly consider death, Novic and her childhood friends interoperate the violence and death all around them into a juvenile game of war which imagines death and killing as temporary. Having told us that “the prospect of… dying was a scarier place than I’d allowed my imagination to go” (22), Novic and her friends are only willing to imagine it as cartoonish. In their game of war, like their “unspoken contest of gore” (12) which develops in their classroom, they reward players who incorporate “slow-motion falls” “postmortem twitching” and “delusional babbling” (50) into their deaths. This exaggeration of death may be seen as a coping mechanism but, it is undoubtedly skirting the implications of death itself. Although they hold the rule that “when you die you have to stay dead” (50) their charade only lasts the length of their match. Further denying the permanency of death, they sometimes allot each player “three lives” (50) (labeled here as lives instead deaths) where after each animated death they rise, play and die again. They use this game to childishly consider death and the consequences of war and to further consider the opposition of