While some of these beyond-help vets "roam at will in Michigan, evading the government and re-enacting atrocities on civilians," one of these failed enfolds, a fellow called Rake who "had very little to go back to" at the end of the war, is "going around taking perfectly cured individuals and returning them to their traumatized states." The Rake situation just can't be tolerated, so the Psych Corps gets involved in trying to stop him.īut of course, the story is not so simple as it seems to be on the surface. But here's the catch: enfolding doesn't always work - especially on vets who have been too psychologically damaged for treatment to do any good. What's left if all goes well is their story, which is the final step in the cure. Veterans have to relive/reenact the particular "causal events" of the experiences leading to their trauma, which, along with the drug Tripizoid, leads to a sort of amnesiac state - while they know they were in the army and that there was some causal event, these people only retain actual memories of things up to that point, and then of what happened afterward. ![]() Kennedy has created an agency called Psych Corps, which would "solve the problem of mental illness in general and the vast horde of returning vets in particular," and under the auspices of this group, the process of "enfolding" occurs. According to one of the people interviewed at the end of the book-within-a-book, "He went over and served and came back and started right to work on his book," his "typewriter going day and night." Allen, who is trying to cope with both the trauma of the war and his own personal pain originating more close to home, has framed Hystopia as a rather surreal, dystopian novel in which the action takes place in an America where Kennedy has successfully dodged a number of assassination attempts and has made it to his third term in office. If you read this book carefully, Hystopia reveals the inner turmoil of a very young man, Eugene Allen, who has recently returned from Vietnam at the time of the novel's writing. You know the one that goes: How many Vietnam vets does it take to screw in a lightbulb? How many? You fucking don't know because you weren't there, man."Īnd therein lies the irony of this novel - in Hystopia, thanks to an initiative put into practice by the third Kennedy administration to help wipe out the traumatic memories of Vietnam vets, those who were there don't remember much more than those who'd never set foot in Vietnam. You see, you had to be here and you weren't. " I wonder who's going to tell the story, Meg? Nothing else to say. There is this wonderful scene on page 154 of this novel, which is actually a book within a book, where one of the characters has a vision where she hears a dead boyfriend saying the following:
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