Poverty and Humanity in I Had Seen Castles :: I Had Seen Castles

Walk through a door, and enter a new world. For John, raised in home resplendent with comfort and first-rate things, Ginnys familys apartment above the fruit market is a radically different environment than his own. Economic differences literally smack him in the face, as he enters the door and walks into towel hung to dry. First lesson how the poor do laundry (Rylant 34). In this brief, potent scene, amidst shirts, towels, underwear, pillowcases hanging in a dwell strung with clotheslines, historical fiction finds crucial expression in the awk struggled blush of a boy ready for a first fitting and unprepared for the world in which he finds himself. Rylant juxtaposes Ginnys poor family, funding on a salary that can only be secured indoors the harsh, unrelenting working conditions of an industrial mill, against Johns family who is oblivious to the worship of poverty or hunger. In this juxtaposition, contemporary issues of economic privilege and workers rights enchant the buddi ng war-time romance of John and Ginny, and to us, the audience, peering in at them. By step by step magnifying Johns discomfort in entering Ginnys shattered neighborhood, Rylant reveals the historical extraordinariness of wealth amidst squalor in the city of Pittsburgh. Mills were cater coal and men so Pittsburgh might live, and Ginnys father gives his invigoration to the mill so his family might live, albeit in the walls of this tiny rented apartment (Rylant 2). both historically realistic and entirely fictitious, Rylants characters break the single positioning of history texts, fleshing out facts with their own stories, and marking our modern time with their experiences (Jacobs and Tunnell 117). I Had Seen Castles primarily chronicles the disillusionment of wartime heroism in the archetypal young solider, John. His illusions of war sustain Ginnys controversial criticisms, though she infuriates and bewilders him, ultimately demonstrating the chilling exit of patriotic propaga nda upon entire American communities throughout WWII. Beyond my diorama impression of young lovers and a venerable mother meeting beneath invigorated laundry, the gruesomeness of war lurks and waits. Rylant brings war history to life in detailed, lettered ways, in dismembered, bloody soldiers, in the child with frozen legs that come stumble in warm bathwater, and in realistic treatment of Johns disenchantment as the war dragged on through 1944, it became more problematic for us to justify to ourselves why we fought (81). Yet Rylant also offers a conniption of the resilience in human beings, through our undeniable bonds to one another, in spite of nationality, class or war loyalties.