The Corpse Washer Analysis

While the end of the Cold War initially seemed to promise a return to global peace, it instead ushered in a new state of warfare. In examining the wars in the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond as a separate category of “new” wars, the continuous cycle of warfare leads to a reality in which peace is the exception rather than the norm and global conflicts are fought through physical battles on the periphery of the capitalist world system. While new transitional networks draw people together, more and more are excluded as “people’s lives are profoundly shaped by events taking place far away from where they live over which they have no control” (Kaldor 74). Through The Things They Carried and The Corpse Washer, the relationship between

While The Corpse Washer occurs in war zone that is also a domestic space for the characters in the text, O’Brien brings the domestic American space to Vietnam through Mary-Anne in order to show that the “kinder, gentler world of the feminine is nothing but an illusion (Smiley 603). As the epitome of American femininity at “seventeen years old, fresh out of Cleveland Heights Senior High” with “long white legs and blue eyes and a complexion like strawberry ice-cream” Mary-Anne dons a pink sweater and white culottes. Her only ambition in life is to marry her childhood sweetheart “and live in a fine gingerbread house near Lake Erie, and have three healthy yellow-haired children, and grow old together and no doubt die in each other’s arms and be buried in the same walnut casket” (O’Brien 90, 89). With her traditional cultural values and appearance, Mary-Anne is the epitome of American female domesticity. However in crossing over to the masculine frontline, Mary-Anne’s transformation to ruthless killer reveals the instability of the traditional value system that separates warfare

He continues to compare his own penetration of death to the pomegranate tree outside the mghaysil, which is watered with the runoff from washing corpses stating “like me this pomegranate tree’s roots are here in the depths of hell” (Antoon). However while the pomegranate tree is “always budding, blossoming, and bearing fruit every spring”, Jawad continues the metaphor stating his own “branches have been cut, broken, and buried with the dead” as he lives a zombie-like existence devoid of meaning, trapped between death and life having give himself over to death, or burying his branches with the dead (Antoon). Alongside elements of fantasy, the narration of The Corpse Washer is marked by critical motifs of death, life, art, and traditional culture which are brought together by Jawad’s final realization: “I had thought that life and death were two separate worlds with clearly marked boundaries. But now I know they are conjoined, sculpting each other … my father knew that, and the pomegranate tree knows it as well” (Antoon). By posing life and death in a continual relationship with one another rather than existing in a binary of opposition, The Corpse Washer reveals how involvement in global conflict “waters” the local environment with death and poses the question as to how long a local space can survive or “blossom” when constantly