Near the beginning of the novel, the narrator, Georges, explains that he has very little memories from his childhood. He has lived a very difficult early life, losing both his parents during WWII, and moving from different boarding houses to different family members as he grew up in a war-torn world as a young child. He also begins the story explaining that he created a story about a land called W told in pictures when he was just 13.

At first when reading through the two different storylines (W and the narrator’s reality), I thought that W was a way of escape from reality for the thirteen year old Georges. An island that has sports as its culture where jobs and way of living revolved around games at first sounded like a dream I would expect of a young teenager wanting to escape his harsh reality. However as I read on and slowly discovered the horrors of W, it became clear that the trauma that has been put into this young child has made its way into this story he created.

At first it was the existence of the Fortress that separated individuals who weren’t working with the sports that set red flags that W isn’t as whimsical as it first sounded. Then it was the big differential treatment between the winners and losers of the games, the weird and lenient laws that do very little to regulate and control the athletes and officials, to the horrific restrictions of female children being born, the way of conceiving children through the Atlantians, and Quarantine for young novice athletes to give a few examples. For someone as young as 13 to have created a land with so much living torture for everyone on this land, it’s terrible to even imagine what kind of things that young child has seen or even experienced.

As the narrator tells his story in the present about how he doesn’t have many childhood memories, at first I just thought “it’s normal, I don’t have too many memories as a young child either” and thought that his first memory at 3 years old was already quite impressive. However, aside from the passage of time, his lack of memory seems to also be attributed to the repression of the terrible memories of how it was like to live during wartimes as a child, and that can be seen through the story of W. He may not have many memories of it in the present, however those hidden traumas and horrible memories live on through the story of W.

Question: Something that kind of confused me while looking back was, what was the significance of Otto Apfelstahl travelling with Gaspard Winckler to look for a boy with the same name during the story of W? What did it add to the story rather than just introducing the island of W on its own?