The Useless Servants

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Arte Publico Press, 1993 M01 1 - 194 pages
In The Useless Servants, award-winning author Rolando Hinojosa captures the obscenity and pointlessness of war in the pages of a Korean War journal written by his fictional everyman, Rafe Buenrostro. Drawing from his own experiences, Hinojosa probes the mind of this Texas country boy who suddenly finds himself in an unknown country fighting in an undeclared war for an unknown reason. Meeting and befriending an unending stream of people who are gone as suddenly as they appear, Rafe alternately fears for his life and is bored to death. Dehumanized by the horrors that surround him, Rafe latches onto the one thing that offers hope for survival: his diary. He records his observations laconically and without emotion in a routine geared to survival and to becoming more effective in the performance of his grisly duty as an artilleryman. Hinojosa is successful in building suspense and irony as much by what is unsaid, unrecorded in the diary, as by what is expressed. In The Useless Servants, Hinojosa departs from his usual genre, the generational novels that chronicle the human comedy in an imaginary region on the Texas-Mexico border. He sets aside the usual theme of inter-ethnic and interpersonal conflict to confront a painful chapter in his own life, placing Rafe Buenrostro, one of his alter egos, in a far more serious drama lived on the edge of sanity on the frontier between physical survival and spiritual destruction.

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Contents

Form Riflemen Form
15
A Troop Cometh
22
Souls Among Lions
27
Five Weeks into the War
38
The Lads Artillery
50
The Pusan Perimeter and Taegu
61
Lambs Without Blemish
72
Nearing the Yalu November 1141950
85
Rest Area
140
Seoul Redux
142
A Spring Break
147
Above All the Waste
154
Beyond the 38th Parallel
156
The Baby Sitters
158
And the Rockets Red Glare
165
The Trade of Kings
170

The Free Ride North
93
Pain Darkness and Cold
101
The Old Firm
112
Five Days at Chipyongni
124
Hoengsong
134
Part II
181
The Last Entries
183
Four Letters
185
Epilogue
Copyright

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Page 11 - ... from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.
Page 11 - You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the caver True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?
Page 11 - And if they were able to converse with one another, would they not suppose that they were naming what was actually before them?
Page 11 - And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent. You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.
Page 11 - ... from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them; for the chains are arranged in such a manner as to prevent them from turning round their heads.
Page 11 - Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads.
Page 11 - Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave? True, he said; how could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads ? And of the objects which are being carried in like manner they would only see the shadows?
Page 11 - That is a strange image, he said, and they are strange prisoners. Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?
Page 103 - EVERYMAN. Alas, I am so faint I may not stand. My limbs under me do fold; Friends, let us not turn again to this land., Not for all the world's gold. For into this cave must I creep And turn to the earth and there to sleep. BEAUTY. What, into this grave? alas! EVERYMAN. Yea, there shall you consume more and less.

About the author (1993)

ROLANDO HINOJOSA, the Ellen Clayton Garwood Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Austin, is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award; the most prestigious prize in Latin American fiction, Casa de las Am?ricas, for the best Spanish American novel in 1976; and the Premio Quinto Sol in 1974. His novels include The Valley / Estampas del Valle, Ask a Policeman, The Useless Servants, and Dear Rafe / Mi querido Rafa, all published by Arte PÏblico Press.

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