In Madagascar Plum, written by Nguyen Thi Minh Ngoc, the story is narrated by a southern Vietnamese officer that was in the war. The setting is in a bar and the officer continues to drink until the point of drunkenness. Once he is shown a plum it leads him to memories of the war when his unit found a young child, who they wrongly accused of participating in absence and go on to murder her. It is clear this officer is affected by PTSD and alcoholism after the war.
Throughout reading this story I couldn’t help but have a feeling that this guy was not reliable in his facts. What first led me to believe this is when he is telling them how they would form false reports so it would make them look better and hopefully be favored by the Americans. They wanted it to seem like they were overly productive and doing as much as they could, when in truth they were not. Throughout the story we see this mention of inflation and it’s a wonder if the narrator inflates everything he knows about the war. It could ultimately go back to Tim O’Brien’s difference between truth and what actually happened.
Another fact that made me question his reliability is his drunkenness. He is obviously a struggling alcoholic and has a hard time controlling his own life never mind remembering the stories that happened during the war. Even during the war he admits to false accusations due to being drunk. He remembers he falsely accused the young girl because he wasn’t in the right state of mind. It seems that overall he used alcohol to cope with what was going on in his country at that time and cannot go back to the way he was before the war.
Another reason the author seems so unreliable is his constant struggle with PTSD years after the war is over. We have seen throughout our other readings how PTSD can take over veterans lives as it did his during the war. He mentions of injuring himself just so he can leave the war, and also takes out his anger and stress on his child over a simple Madagascar plum.
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