Soldiers of Salamis | Writing Styles, Rule of Four, and Ethics

Hey Everyone, 

Writing this week’s blog post has been the absolute worst for me. To start off, I read and completed my blog post for next week by accident. Then, WordPress stopped working. Anyways, I found this reading really interesting. I finished it in about 3 separate sittings (with some short breaks on my phone), one for each section. I found it really confusing to switch between the sections, as the change in narration (and the style of writing) had caught me off guard. The first and third sections in particular reminded me of reading qualitative research papers with snippets of interviews in them. However, it was much more enjoyable because we (readers) got to know what the narrator was doing. 

The hardest section for me to read was the second one. If I’m being honest, I spent most of it skimming rather than reading because I would skip over long names, dates, and places, leaving me very little to actually read. This is a very bad habit of mine as I end up getting confused although every time I try to pay attention to them, I get lost anyways. While the style of the second section was a much more effective way to get information since there’s less reading and more information, the first and third section were a lot more exciting to read. It makes me wonder why Cercas (the author, not the narrator), chose to write in both styles rather than stay consistent with one. I think the reason why the first and third section was more interesting was that it is two stories merged into one: the first is following Cercas (the narrator, not the author) around as he interviews and discovers more about Mazas’ life, and the second is following Maza’s story. 

One thing I noticed in this book is that it really goes against the rule of three. When learning English, I learned that writing in three’s is more effective or pleasing to readers. However, two examples near the end are “…even though for many years they’d been dead, dead, dead” (363), and “…not really caring as long as it’s onwards, onwards, onwards, ever onwards” (365). I wonder if in Spanish there is a rule of four instead, as different languages have their own rules. 

After watching the video lecture by Professor Beasley-Murray, I spent a lot of time thinking about reality and fiction. My question to you this week piggybacks off his to us: from a moral standpoint, is writing with some truth but some fiction, even with a disclaimer that the text is a work of fiction, ethical? While this specific ‘novel’ is not harming anyone, we know that spreading false information that is damaging to a person’s reputation is called “defamation of character”. Therefore, I ask whether the intertwining of truth and fiction could result in such issues.