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Complexities

In the past blog posts, I feel as though have talked about some of the more obvious topics and themes in books we have examined together. For this week’s blog post, I want to dive deep into Omar El Akkad’s American War to understand the complexities of the characters and their situations. I want to focus on Sarat in particular.

Now, what do I mean by complexities of characters? Complexities within characters are events or developments that change a character. Usually, this happens as the plot unfolds. In relation to American War, we can see a shift in the character of Sarat after the raid at Patience. Sarat loses her mother in the violent raid. Her brother is severely injured. She rises into the mold that Gaines has shaped her into through subtle exposure and indoctrination to his ideology. She thirsts for revenge, which becomes the banner she marches under as she joins the cause for the South. We can see how Sarat continues to develop even more complexities when her twin sister Dana is killed. Dana’s death pushes her even further down the path for revenge. She kills a high-ranking general, which shifts the tide of the war.


All of these complexities within Sarat come to a head when she is released from Sugarloaf and returns home. She struggles to reenter into normal society after suffering such devastating trauma in the prisoner of war’s camp. The past trauma from her childhood at Patience, the loss of family and friends during the war, and the recent trauma of Sugarloaf wears on her. Even her own body carries her trauma and grief. Sarat has deep scars and disfigurements on her body that harken back to her time in Sugarloaf. She continues to carry revenge with her by killing her own prison guard. Sarat’s final act of revenge is releasing the Slower Disease in Columbus.


Sarat’s dissent into various fits of revenge and rage ultimately reveal how she remains stuck in the past. There are moments after she comes home from Sugarloaf that she seems to feel some kind of relief. This can be seen when she plays in the river with her nephew Benjamin or when she has moments that she seems to have some relief. Ultimately, the trauma she sustained from the war overtakes her.


These layers of complexities within Sarat’s character ultimately stem from her thirst for revenge. They serve to develop her into a broken individual and show how the circumstances surrounding war bring grief, trauma, and brokenness to individuals that are in the midst of the war. The development of the war created Sarat into an individual bent on extracting revenge. I suppose Sarat had spend so many years extracting revenge on the larger entity (namely the North) of people who killed her family and on individuals who hurt her in horrible ways that she knew no other life. Perhaps when she released the Slower as her final act of revenge, she felt some kind of peace for the first time in a long time.


What do you think about the complexities of Sarat as a character? Leave your comments below!

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