Beautiful Ruins

Walter switches forms in Chapter 4 and depicts Alvis’s service in WWII in the form of an excerpt from Alvis’s manuscript of The Smile of Heaven. The novel even changes the font style to approximate the a 20th-century typewriter font. The font change gives the chapter the appearance of a real manuscript and signals a switch in perspective: The previous chapters are all written in the third person and utilize an omniscient narrator, while Chapter 4 is written in the first person from Alvis’s perspective. The inclusion of an autobiographical manuscript in an otherwise straight-forward but temporally distorted narrative allows the novel to take on characteristics of an epistolary novel written in the form of documents such as letters, diary entries, newspaper clippings, or excerpts from books. Popularized in the 18th-century, epistolary fiction experienced a reemergence during contemporary times. Postmodernist writers like Walter play with the epistolary form in their work to create a sense of fragmentation and eclecticism.

Throughout the chapter, Alvis frequently refers to WWII as “my war.” He does not believe in WWII as an objective historical event. Instead, he views it as an abstract construction comprised of the subjective experiences of millions of different soldiers, most notably his own. He derives his mental concept from his own unique experience. Every soldier’s conception includes what Alvis terms the “larger tactics at hand” (75) or undeniable, concrete phenomena like major battles, the Holocaust, and the growing animosity between the United States and the Soviet Union—but Alvis’s WWII is mundane and banal, consisting of “wet, fretful marches up dirt roads and down hillsides to the edges of bombed-out villages, short bursts of interrogating dead-eyed dirty peasants who begged us for food” (76). Alvis deconstructs the idea that historical events are completely objective entities and depicts a banal version of WWII antithetical to the idealized version that is held as objective truth.

In Chapter 5, Walter switches back to the narrative technique he employs in Chapters 1-3 and introduces Michael Deane, the novel’s antagonist. Walter establishes Michael Deane as a lecherous character who views other people through a materialistic lens. When he looks at his wife, all he sees is “the full protuberant effect of his recent investment in her retromammary cavities, for minimal capsular contracture and scarring, between breast tissue and pectoral muscle, replacing the old, slightly drooping silicone sacs” (91). The use of medical terms in this sentence points toward an intense obsession with the human body that befits a perverted individual obsessed with animalistic desires. In addition, Michael Deane makes an “investment” in his wife as though she is a product. He does not consider his wife a person; for him, she is a sexual and consumer object.

Shane demonstrates a significant change in character in Chapter 5 when he refuses to translate for Michael Deane unless Michael Deane listens to his pitch. In Chapter 2, Walter portrays Shane as a spoiled failure losing hope in himself. Saundra refers to him as “milk-fed veal” (99) since he is “a part of a ruined generation of young men coddled by their parents—by their mothers especially—raised on unearned self-esteem, in a bubble of over affection, in a sad incubator of phony achievement” (99). Shane tires of being weak and pathetic, and he boldly delivers an ultimatum that makes him feel like “a bull, a man on the come, a winner” (100).

Walter plays with symbolism and motifs throughout Chapter 6. The Roman ruins Pasquale and Dee see on their hike on the cliff symbolize fading legacy. The portrait of the girl in the pillbox bunker stands in for Dee, who—like the painting—hides away from prying eyes in Porto Vergogna, the port of shame.

Walter creates an ironic twist in Chapter 6: Pasquale hates Dee’s lover for impregnating Dee and abandoning her, but he impregnates Amedea and backs away from her and their son. The hypocrisy adds an interesting element to Pasquale’s character. Pasquale’s decency stands out throughout Beautiful Ruins, but his negligence toward Amedea and Bruno serves as a flaw in his otherwise moral, dedicated personality.