rnated with one another: one a set of brief and brutal sketches of police shootings, bullfight crises, hanging of criminals, and incidents of the war; and the other a set of stories dealing in its principal sequence with the growing-up of an American boy against a landscape of idyllic Michigan, but interspersed also with glimpses of American soldiers returning home (Wilson 17).
Wilson believes that the war was intended to be the key for the whole book, and the brutality of the war is contrasted with the more idyllic and peaceful scenes of the boy at home in the States. Later, however, the boy turns up as a soldier in the Italian army and is shot in the spine by machine-gun fire. Wilson finds that this indicates a more fundamental relationship between the stories in the two interlocked series in the book:
The shooting of Nick in the war does not really connect two different worlds: has he not found in the butchery abroad the same world that he knew back in Michigan? Was not l
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