Essay Questions

How does “An African Story” almost seem out of place in this collection while also possibly being the glue that holds the collection together?

This story might feel the most out of place in this collection because the unifying character of the RAF pilot only appears in the first two pages and then disappears from the action altogether. However, he does not disappear from the narrative and that difference is what actually makes this story possibly the centerpiece of the entire collection. “An African Story” is actually a story-within-a-story-within-a-story-within-a-story. It features a narrator telling a story about young pilot who is stranded in a remote are of Africa after crashing his plane. The narrator learns that this pilot wrote down a story that the old man who took him and cared for him until he was rescued conveyed to him. The bulk of the story is that story the old man told the young pilot.

Thus, there are four degrees of separation between the main events of the story and the reader. Those events are entirely reasonably and easy to believe with one single fantastical exception that calls the entire thing into question. And so the question that is never directly raised is: who is responsible for introducing that fantastical element, the old man telling the story or pilot writing it down? This is the symbolic heart of the not just this story, but all war stories. How much is fact and how much is fiction? How much heroism is actually just a reflexive response to fear? How much of what could have happened is something that would have happened?

How is Fin’s crazy explanation of what happened when he missing for two days key to the collection’s overall themes exploring the psychology of bomber pilots at war?

A pilot named Fin appears in more than one story but is the central character in “They Shall Not Grow Old.” It is important to keep in mind that this is a collection unified by the subject of RAF pilots fighting across the globe during World War II. These are not stories of military heroism, but rather very dark peeks inside the very dark psyches of the men who did this thing so as to reveal the decidedly non-heroic aspect of war. Fin undergoes a very surreal and inexplicable experience in which he and his plane are missing for two days but when he arrives back at the airbase, he is flabbergasted by what he is told and insists his entire mission was not even two hours.

The story he tells is unbelievable and bizarre in the details, but absolutely makes sense thematically: it is a story that at its heart celebrates dying in battle as the only real way to escape forever the circular madness of the ever-repeating recurrence of the same experience of near-death over and over again. Fin’s story symbolically highlights the pressure and anxiety that permeates the lives of those fighting the war in the air who know that each successive mission their odds of going home alive become an even more unlikely longshot hardly worth betting on.

What is the significance of the title “Someone Like You” to the collection’s overall theme exploring the psyche of the RAF pilot?

This story begins innocently enough but very quickly turns dark with the pilot’s talk of “jinking” his plane a little this or that so that he might kill a house filled with German soldiers or perhaps miss that house and drop a bomb on a shelter hiding an old man. Then there is the story of Stinker and his dog Smith. The mood is being set to reveal the insanity of war or, perhaps, the potential for insanity among those fighting the war. The story closes with one of the pilots musing over what would the reaction if suddenly everybody inside the bar just fell dead to the floor. They both agree that such a situation would cause a “blood row” of outrage at the circumstances. Then both admit to having killed more at one time with the bombs they’ve dropped from their plans than comprise the entirety of patrons in the bar and how such a mass killing goes unnoticed. When the second pilot tries to suggest it isn’t the same thing, the title become abundantly clear. The only different between a hundred people dropping dead in an instant in a bar and a hundred people dropping dead in an instant because a bomb dropped on them is context. But oh how that context would change if those people beneath the bomb were someone like you. Or, more to the point, you.