The home front : a novel

The Home Front is set in Winnipeg during World War II, between 1941 and 1945.It is the story of a young girl, the eldest of three siblings, whose father, a member of The Winnipeg Grenadiers, is a prisoner of war in Hong Kong.The Grenadiers were sent in the autumn of l94l to take part in the defense of the British colony of Hong Kong.Insufficiently tained and under strength, the Grenadiers were ill prepared for battle.Their commander, Brigadier Lawson, was confident that with a few more months of training they would be fit for combat, but this was not to be.War with Japan was imminent, and it broke out on December 7 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.The next day the Japanese attacked Hong Kong.Although the troops fought valiantly, they were forced to surrender on Christmas Day.Many of the men died in battle, and many more died during the four years of incarceration during which they were treated brutally and forced to perform hard labour while barely surviving on a starvation diet.The prison cnmps lacked sanitation, g¡rd many of the deaths were due to diseases such as beriberi, dysentery, diphtheria and typhoid.Their hardships ended with the end of the war in August 1945.The Home Front does not particularly concern itself with that narrative, but it does locate there Victor Dennis, ttre young protagonist's father, and one of the lucþ ones-he retumed to his family in September 1945.The protagonist, Moir4 is the eldest of three children.She is seven years old in the beginning, her sister Barba¡a is five and their brother Roger just two.Their mother Lucy, who While the material in this story is drawn from my personal memory, and while the narrative might point toward memoir,I have chosen to fictionalize it in order to gain gteater freedom in my vwiting.The novel is written in the third person in order to remove myself as author from my own story as I tum it into discowse.I have centred the narrative in the young girl,s consciousness by drawing out her innermost thoughts and feelings, in part by the use of free indirect discourse, as in the incident on the beach where Moira discovers that her sister is missing, and when she wonders what her mentally challenged cousin Charlie is thinking as he gazesinto space.Some other examples of the use of free indirect discourse are the description of Lucy's angst while waiting for her husband to come to the boarding house, and her tears of frustration when he leaves her alone with the children on the train back to Winnipeg.Also, through the use of free indirect discourse I have depicted Moira's fear and con-firsion over the possibitity of catching scarlet fever.There is throughout the novel a blending of the omniscient narrator's voice with the girl's in order to cente in the girl's point of view without surrendering to first-person na¡rative.I have utilized diary entries, which I have structured using a child's language in order to get inside Moira's mind and convey her point of view.The flust-person narration in these excerpts allows me to show events and feelings as Moira experiences them.I have also used a "child's" font in order to suggest the chirography of the young girl.Another way in which I have tried to get inside the child's mind is the employment of Victor Shklovsþ's method of describing objects rather than naming them.For example, I have done this in describing the contents of the doctor's black bag.Moira is intimately familiar with this bag, as the doctor has paid visits to her in the past and she has experienced the discomfort of having her tongue depressed and her ears probed, and felt the cold of the stethoscope on her bare

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