“American movies, English books - remember how they all end?" Gamini asked that night. "The American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That's it. The camera leaves with him. He looks out of the window at Mombasa or Vietnam or Jakarta, someplace now he can look at through the clouds. The tired hero. A couple of words to the girl beside him. He's going home. So the war, to all purposes, is over. That's enough reality for the West. It's probably the history of the last two hundred years of Western political writing. Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit."
This quote from the book summarizes what the entire book is about. It is about an endless conflict between the east and the west. The speaker intends to say that war has a shelf life in the west and they are not quite as affected by war. For the west, the war never seems to hit home. It is a thing talked about in movies. However, for the east, it is quotidian reality. It is also perhaps a comment on the western tendency to lionize war as the east is submerged in it.
The narrator seems to personify this conflict; she takes on her brother's name and is conflicted in identity, unsure of whether she belongs to the east or the west. Her identity is split between the two. The postcolonial element surfaces as she chooses to take her brother's name. The inherent power structure is delineated, as the narrator succumb's to the lure of taking her brother's identity. She bends to his will by doing what he wishes to get that name, and thus, subordinates herself. This shows a dichotomy in the East. While she possesses enough agency to be able to change her name, she has to subordinate herself to her brother to be able to take his name.
The bones of Sailor can be seen as representative of a larger demographic of Sri Lankans who are unable to retain agency and stripped of their own collective voice. Sailor personifies the struggle of the East to write above the political hegemony that afflicts this cultural space.
