Within Gods Go Begging, one of the first scenes we see is the image of two dead bodies wrapped around one another. We later learn that these deaths were due to a senseless killing. Shortly after, we enter Jesse’s life, and are shown the terribly brutal and emotionally riveting story of his time in Vietnam. Watching his friends have their lives stripped away, smelling the hot, humid air that carries the smell of a decomposing corpse to his nostrils, each and every night holding onto life as the firefight with the North Vietnamese continues. However traumatizing Jesse’s experience within Vietnam was, it is the ramifications of these episodes that produce greater harm.
Even decades after the war, Jesse still faces post traumatic distress, shown to us vividly through both his flashback dreams as well as his inability to connect with anyone on a deep, sincere level. Jesse’s life fits into many gothic themes: first of all, he is completely isolated. Although he has friends, a girlfriend, and a job as a public defense attorney, he is ultimately alone. His inability to love Carolina and show any meaningful affection towards her is a key example of how Jesse’s time in Vietnam has severely affected his life back home. Jesse’s self-described personality of “stone” reveals how nothing after the war is meaningful: after enduring something so awful, Jesse can never live normally again.
Continuing with Jesse’s isolation is another gothic element of internal conflict. Jesse’s dreams, his flashbacks, his memories of his dead soldiers, his memories of his Vietnamese friend who was subjected to the inhumanity of having a screw driver clear his memory and take his life, all have a profound affect on Jesse and his mind. He never feels at ease: he is constantly rubbing his old dog-tags from the war to bring him comfort; always turning back to his jade piece in search of comfort and relief. Jesse seems aware of his disconnectedness with his girlfriend, yet can’t seem to rectify his inability to become closer with her. We see Jesse admire and adore Carolina, and even shed light on his awareness of his coldness to her, yet despite all this, Jesse simply can’t bring himself to feel any emotion or any deep connection. The war turned him to stone, he says. After experiencing the war, nothing back in regular life is real to Jesse — nothing matters like it did in Vietnam.
Another gothic element that I saw within the novel is the notion of the abject and the uncanny, as we have discussed within class. During the war, and the descriptions of the war, we see a great deal of uncertainty, of fear, fear of the unknown. While fighting on the hill, Jesse and his fellow soldiers say that they are so close to the enemy they can hear their voices; this eerie and unsettling instance was one point in particular that reminded me of the abject. The Vietnamese are the other — they are the unknown, the unidentified of whom the soldiers are fighting against. Their whereabouts, their strategy, their strength, are all, for the most part, unknown to the soldiers. They are left to fight this unknown enemy: an enemy that has a substantial upper-hand due to their knowledge of the terrain in which they are located. It is the fear of the unknown, the fear of not knowing what is going to happen, who is going to survive to see the sunrise, that is a profound gothic element within these war scenes.
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It really is important to understand the trauma that Jesse has with the Vietnam war. It controls his past, present, and future. Nothing he does throughout the book is without having some reference or recollection of the Vietnam war. “For years it would take him hours to fall asleep afterward…Two men who had perished long, long ago had become Jesse’s most intimate acquaintances…The first was an African-American staff sergeant. The other had been an enemy soldier”(Vea,74). Here we see the turmoil that had accompanied Jesse’s memories of Vietnam. He could not fall asleep and kept in contact mentally with the two friends that he had made. He would also have uncontrollable fits of memories coming to life until he learned to control them; “Jesse unclenched his fists and closed his eyes to help release the anger. The Veterans’ Administration psychologists had taught him how to distract himself with unrelated thoughts whenever the pangs came”(Vea,38). This shows the reader the poor techniques phycologists administered to those veterans who came back from Vietnam.
Another important aspect of the book is the focus on how Vietnam was fought by a multi-racial America and how there we still civil rights problems for minorities. When a prisoner of war asked him if the United Stated was a separated country he responds yes. “In the north of my country, the children are told in school that all the people of color in the United States live in a separate country”(Vea,81). Even after the war had ended and he was back home, the division that he lived in through the war was not over. He also dealt with divisions in his work place and felt the racial problems, as one client shows hostility towards him he says, “He could easily think of his brown lawyer as a slave…He could use him”(Vea,61). This discriminatory reference from his client was one that Jesse Pasadoble had to deal with. His feeling of isolation from his country, society, girlfriend and fellow co-workers led to his increased post traumatic stress disorder. This lead to his suicide at the end by floating away with all his pains and memories.
Works Cited
Vea, Alfredo. Gods Go Begging. Penguin Group, New York. 1999. Print.