Novels contest dehumanization by staging grief as a demand for burial and closure

Evidence

Central to The Wasted Vigil are the themes of broken families and lost loved ones. Lara comes to Usha in search of her brother. Marcus has over time lost a wife, a daughter, and a grandson—as well as one of his hands—to the pitiless brutality of the Taliban; in flashback, we learn of his daughter’s own lost lover and her first meeting with David Town; and David’s own brother, Jonathan, is missing and presumed killed in Vietnam. The idea of wanting to find out what happened to these loved ones and to be able to lay them to rest and gain closure threads the book together. Aslam invokes the classical stories of Priam begging Achilles for the body of Hector and Antigone’s defiant determination to give her brother due burial against Creon’s orders. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 407

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and the return-of-body theme, and to Morey’s larger argument about how fiction humanizes by refusing ideological abstraction.
• SEED: Angle: how the corpse—unburied, missing, contested—functions as fiction’s most stubborn rebuke to ideological abstraction, in the war-on-terror novel.