The Second Republic

The story, at least the one that Nick is telling, is a story of what men do to each other and to women and children in the name of nationalism, freedom, and liberation. The speaker stands at a distance and observes in a cool, deadpan tone the horrors of dead bodies on the street, men hung by the genitals with barbed wire, and other such atrocities in the name of liberation. And it is in this world that the complicity of the one fleeing is expressed in the very personal trauma of the exiled.