Parade’s End is a sensory overload, it creates a sense of anxiety and dread throughout the reading by using run-on sentences and fragments of sentences to throw the reader off balance. The use of these techniques helps show the fear and chaos of both living in Cuba under an authoritarian regime and attempting to escape it. Many ‘rules’ of writing are broken in this story and it helps show that there are no rules when trying to escape and trying to understand the world around you when it is also broken. The main character seems to be trapped in limbo and time has no meaning when in this state, present and past are intertwined. The style choices help promote this feeling by making it difficult to pinpoint exactly what is happening at a given moment, the main character also does not know what is happening or what is going to happen and is just hoping for the best. These fragments seem like memories, they are not coherent or make much sense but it is difficult to remember everything that occurs in a traumatic experience, especially if it is over a long period of time like this one. When there is so much happening at once only small snippets are remembered and it seems like this story is sharing those small pieces that are remembered so clearly when chaos of the event becomes background noise. By breaking norms of writing this story helps convey the anxiety of the situation to an audience that has never had to experience it.
Hey Mary, thanks for sharing your thoughts, I definitely agree with your analysis. Breaking literature rules seems reflective of the chaos of Cuban immigration in the 1980s and 90s and the anxiety that you describe this writing style as causing suggests to me the sentiment of crisis during this time. I like the way you describe how the chaos as becoming background noise, it does seem like the way that the narrrator fixates on small unimportant details acts a coping mechanism. The overwhelming stress of the situation demands an attention to anything that acts as a distraction or a reminder of his existence. By the end of the story, the pace seems to speed up and anxiety becomes increasingly evident in both the words and the writing style, it almost reminds me of a racing heart. I think that Arena’s does a good job of emulating the desperation of the Cuban immigration crisis with his writing and I agree with you that this story is an effective source for those who did not experience this crisis to understand the chaos.