Another is with him on the tour, Sergeant Dime, 24, a smart, tough soldier equipped with a highly refined bullshit detector. One of the men he most admired died in his arms. He is looking for people to believe in, to trust, to admire, to help him figure out how the world works. Billy’s innocence displays when he is smitten with one of the Cowboy cheerleaders. But he is also an innocent, a virgin in many ways. His maturity emerges when he ponders larger philosophical questions or sees through some of the shallowness and hypocrisy around him. He has endured a difficult family life in which his wheelchair-bound father sought refuge from his disappointments in alcohol and bitterness. That Ben Fountain succeeds so well in making Billy work both as a character in his own right and a literary mechanism speaks to the extraordinary talent on display.īen Fountain - image from Texas Monthly - Photograph by Randal Fordīilly has killed enemy combatants and has lost close friends. He is also the window through which we get a hard look at the reality of millennial America. SPC Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old, silver-star-recipient and bona fide war hero, is about to be honored at the Dallas Cowboys’ Thanksgiving home game, along with seven other members of Bravo company, for bravery in a battle that had the benefit of a Fox news crew with plenty of film.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |