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The epilogue of the text is a letter written post-war from a mother to her dead son Bill. Eleanor Wimbish’s depth of love for her son and suffering over his loss is put to the reader and though it lays bare one of the primary cruelties of war, the anguish of a parent at the death of their child, the implied reader sees that Edelman has used her story to show the strength that people draw from their ability to be connected.

letters

Furthermore, in Dear America Edelman has incorporated within the overarching plot some sub-plots particular to certain soldiers to ensure the reader is taken on a narrative journey that can deliver to them the level of emotional impact that is needed to in some way grasp an understanding of the traumas endured

Poetry by the soldiers adds to this, one expresses, ‘We suffer in agony, as women, In labour. But we die with the birth, for Our child is war’.

Edelman comments, ‘chapters suggested themselves…into a sequence that would relate a year’s tour in Vietnam’. The chapter titles work on a metaphorical level to show

Oct 8, 1883