Vietnam can be seen as a sort of gothic space in the novel “Gods Go Begging.” It is a place where a diverse U.S. army is forced to fight together. The army includes African Americans, Native Americans and Mexicans fighting for the United States. These are all cultures that are seen as outsiders in the United States. They are forced to fight for a country that normally oppresses them.
These oppressed men are thrown into a strange foreign country that they know nothing about. The war that they are fighting is brutal and bloody, and death is occurring all around them. The landscape of Vietnam, as portrayed in the book, is a constant war zone with charred grass and mutilated bodies scattered all around. The trees and flowers are twisted and destroyed. Body parts of soldiers are strewn across the battle field. The air is smoky and permeated with the smell of death. The deafening sound of gunshots and explosives is constant.
There is a constant fear of death and the American Soldiers are obviously not wanted there. The soldiers who return home, however, find that they don’t belong there either. They are forced back into the gothic space that is Vietnam because they no longer have a life in the United States. In this sense, Vietnam can be seen as a place filled with death and blood where outsiders are sent to fend for themselves. They are exiled to this wasteland to fight for a country that will never acknowledge them.
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Gods Go Begging by Alfredo Vea Jr contains elements of the gothic. We see this representation in one of the first scenes of the book. Vea throws the image of dead bodies in the beginning of the book to the readers. Death and specifically, killings are examples of the gothic that have been a constant throughout gothic novels and stories that we have read such as La Llorona and The Hungry Woman. Additionally, feelings of despair and darkness are presented within the setting of the Vietnam War. This specific war provides to the gothic because of its landscape, which gives a swampy, dark, and mysterious background. This geographic landscape is that of a hot, humid jungle/swamp, and the representation of the swamp is consistent with the genre of the southern gothic of the United States. Furthermore, the archetype of the mystery, that is so apparent in the gothic, derives from the sentiments that soldiers have expressed where they felt that in that environment of the Vietnam War, the feeling of anything happening at any time. In it of itself, the Vietnam War produced much death and human right atrocities that plays once again into the belief of the novel containing elements of the gothic.