Loss and the Durability of Everyday Life in Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow and Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country

The first-person narrator of Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow and Samantha Hughes, the main character in Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, encounter life-changing peripeteias long before they reach adulthood. They both focus on young men whom they never knew through direct experience. These men are fallen soldiers and at the age of 19 their deaths are not only violent, but premature and tragic. Upon reaching a resolve to know more about their own lives Timm’s narrator and Samantha Hughes explore the lives of these figures who would have otherwise played a significant role in their lives. The protagonists of these novels investigate Karl-Heinz Timm and Dwayne Hughes through time from the panoptic view of the present. Uwe Timm examines the familial memories and the relics of his significantly older brother killed on the eastern front in October of 1943. Mason depicts an adolescent, born in October 1966 now almost majority age who never knew her father because he was killed in Vietnam one month before her birth. Both protagonists refer to themselves as an “afterthought” (Timm 4; Mason 184). In their own eyes they are low in the family hierarchy. The latency of their willingness to face the past and ask questions leads to processing their familial losses indirectly through the memories and stories of others.

Even though these novels are about very different moments in history, different nations, cultures, and acts of war they possess noteworthy similarities. Timm’s book is profoundly autobiographical; he writes about his family. Bobbie Ann Mason’s novel is a work of realistic fiction and set in her native Western Kentucky. Even with these differences both books are motivated by the desire for knowledge about a lost parental figure (Timm’s brother is his godfather and 16 years his elder), the expressed uselessness of history books for this knowledge (Timm 88, and Mason 48 and 187), as well as the centrality of family pictures, letters, and diaries as vestiges of the deceased. Information abounds but it is cryptic and contributes to an obstinate sense of mystery as much as it fills in the picture of who these young men were. Another common feature of these books, besides the focus on loss, is the centrality of everyday life. In My Brother’s Shadow and In Country demonstrate how absence caused by state-mandated violence exerts an enduring presence of a lost family member on the routines and habits that define daily existence of the novels’ protagonists and their families. These novels articulate a drubbing and tenacious emotional uncertainty due to the persistent presence of the absent person in the memories of others and the emotional voids that they feel.

We encounter a paradox in an expression such as the presence of loss, or the presence of an absence, but this paradox affords both narratives the tenor of eulogies situated in everyday living. This essay examines the junctures of daily living and loss in order to reveal the uneasy resonance that manifests itself between the permanence of loss and the durability of practices of everyday life. Timm and Mason make loss visible in the preparation of food, in distractions of reading and watching TV, having parties, in innocuous self-destructive moments of rebellion, earning money, going shopping, and ultimately recognizing the geography of loss whether it is located in the Ukraine or entails visiting the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington D.C.

Axiomatic to both stories is the experience of what Marianne Hirsch has called “postmemory” or “the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated” (Hirsch 22). Inherent to Hirsch’s concept is the reality that those remembered, due to dyssynchronous lives, offer the recipients of postmemory no opportunity for a direct emotional or psychological attachment. This central commonality of the novels collapses their vastly different settings into analogous expressions...