In the following excerpt, Bliss supports her premise that the questions raised by one family's experience of the Vietnam war cannot be understood without also addressing gender issues that form the subtext of In Country.
Clearly, In Country's basic text is about the process whereby Samantha Hughes learns about the Vietnam War, her dead father's role in that war, and her Uncle Emmett's experiences there. But just as surely the novel contains a subtext dealing with the way attitudes toward gender have conditioned the characters' interpretation of that experience. I propose here to look at this aspect of In Country in the depiction of the world of the novel and the values of its minor characters, and particularly in Sam's development
An examination of seemingly peripheral cultural background elements Illustrates that the novel ties together the.....
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