In the Place of Prayer

Englund, Andrew Aaron (2023) In the Place of Prayer. Masters thesis, Northern Arizona University.

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Abstract

In The Place of Prayer is a true story. While categorically my novel falls into the genre of historical fiction, I have approached this project with the intent to include only the instances and situations that I or someone I know has experienced. There are scenes in this book where events and timelines have been reorganized to present a more followable narrative arc, but I have taken great care to uphold the integrity of the story’s truth. I see this commitment as an essential feature that must be respected if this work is to accomplish its goal. Which is this: I want to make the more extreme manifestations of humanity that are displayed in situations like war to be known as just that. Human. Real and understandable. I want the reader to see that the people who are involved are not otherworldly, superhero or supervillian-esque individuals whose motivations, faults, and intrinsic natures are somehow removed from what the rest of humankind is doing their best to be successful with. I want to demonstrate very clearly the realities of this world, and especially how the obstacles that appear to be insurmountable have been constructed in the same fashion as everything else, one decision on top of another. And that there is hope in this. Contained within the fact that we have created these problems for ourselves is an equal and opposite ability to create a new reality. In the face of everything that we are up against, we have within and among us an abundance of the courage and intelligence and love that we need. All that needs to happen is for us as individuals to be making better decisions. Simple as that. To this aim, my prose employs multiple distinct rhetorical features. On the narrative level, the story is told in the first person, and I have chosen to let each piece of dialogue stand as its own paragraph and to forgo dialogue tags altogether. Rather than remaining exclusively with the narrator as he tells the story, the reader is able to travel back into the time and place where these moments of dialogue actually happened and to experience them as they occurred. My decision to go forward in this was reinforced by seeing something similar done with incredible effect by Yuri Herrera in Signs Preceding the End of the World. In addition to the dialogue-induced time jumps, there is a version of the narrator who is ten years older than his current self that occasionally shows up in the footnotes to comment on what he sees, to clarify a perspective, or to correct what has been said when he feels it to be necessary, bestowing the story with the gained wisdom of his years. The footnotes are also a place where the narrator explains in various levels of detail the jargon, acronyms, sociopolitical nuances, and even the inside joke of the Marine Corps and of his unit. They are comparable to how Junot Dias employed footnotes to explain the history and features of Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship in The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao. These features allow the story to be simultaneously delivered as a (somewhat) linear succession of events, as well as the culminating experience of them existing within the moment of a memory. Instead of the reader being told the story from across a table, they are being led along through the memories of the narrator while he explains to them what they are witnessing. There are two linear timelines that the narrative oscillates between. One follows the group of Marines across their deployment to the Helmand Province of Afghanistan, and the other describes the events during the training workup which preceded and the post-deployment period that followed it. With this, I highlight the processes that the Marine Corps uses to prepare a person for the unnatural acts of killing and war, what happens when their training is met with real-world situations, and how these wartime experiences affect an individual’s life going forward. More than that though, I want to show how the happenings of deployment are not isolated events, and I have organized the two timelines to demonstrate this in the way that they communicate with each other, taking most of my inspiration for this kind of storytelling from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. While many of these features can be considered experimental, they were all born as natural parts of a writing process that is centered on a desire to present the most accurate and obtainable representation of the experience that they describe. Following in the path of works such as Left of Boom, Eat the Apple, and The Things They Carried, In The Place of Prayer is an invitation for its readers to expand the range of their empathy by building upon the compassion within their perspective.

Item Type:	Thesis (Masters)
Publisher’s Statement:	© Copyright is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the Cline Library, Northern Arizona University. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Keywords:	American fiction; Novels
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PS American literature
NAU Depositing Author Academic Status:	Student
Department/Unit:	Graduate College > Theses and Dissertations College of Arts and Letters > English
Date Deposited:	30 Aug 2023 17:21
Last Modified:	30 Aug 2023 17:21
URI:	https://openknowledge.nau.edu/id/eprint/6110

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