World War II

World War II is a recurring historical reference point rather than a continuously depicted episode of combat. Through a ceremonial knife, Ray’s military service, and the postwar chronology of Domenico’s story, the war connects private family memory with later political conflict and the altered routines of civilian life. Its most consequential material legacy is a weapon brought home as a souvenir and later used by Thomas in his self-amputation.

The war as a family inheritance

In the account of Thomas’s act in the library on October 12, 1990, the war enters the present through an object kept in the family home. Thomas takes the Gurkha knife that Ray had brought back from World War II as a souvenir. Until the previous afternoon, the knife had hung sheathed and forgotten on a bedroom wall in the house where the twins grew up. Its earlier status as a memento makes its later use especially stark: an object retained from wartime becomes the instrument of a crisis decades afterward.

The knife is not described as an heirloom passed down through a deliberate ceremony or as an item Ray actively used in the later family crisis. It is simply there, attached to Ray’s past and then reclaimed by Thomas. That ordinary domestic placement—the blade hanging upstairs, out of mind—makes the transition from souvenir to weapon abrupt. In Thomas’s hands, the old object acquires a new and devastating purpose, though the evidence does not suggest that its wartime origin determines his act.

Ray’s military past and the later conflict

Ray’s connection to World War II is also personal: he is described as a veteran of both that war and the Korean War. When Dominick tells him that Thomas has cut off his hand, Ray listens as the details accumulate: Thomas took the knife from the wall, sharpened it on the grinding stone in the garage, and carried out the amputation. Dominick also tells him that he decided against having surgeons attempt reattachment. Ray’s response is presented through his movements as well as his words; he carefully puts his fishing equipment back in order, washes his hands at the kitchen sink, and goes upstairs to change before they leave for the hospital.

On the drive to Shanley Memorial, Ray reads a newspaper story that connects Thomas’s act to the standoff over Kuwait. He objects to the paper’s treatment of the amputation as a sacrifice intended to end the crisis, insisting that Thomas is mentally ill rather than a political protester. Dominick counters that his brother meant the act as an antiwar statement and hoped that Bush and Hussein would take notice and stop. The disagreement sets Ray’s own wartime experience against Thomas’s imagined power to interrupt a new conflict: the older man rejects the heroic framing, while Dominick sees an eccentric but genuine effort to avert war.

The newspaper’s accompanying image further complicates Ray’s reaction. It shows Thomas in a high-school yearbook photograph, with long hair, sideburns, and a peace sign pinned to his jacket. Ray’s recollection of Vietnam-era draft dodgers, whom he had once said should be taken away and shot, makes clear that his response to antiwar protest is shaped by an earlier political and generational divide. World War II thus helps establish Ray’s identity, while his later reaction shows that military service does not make him receptive to Thomas’s form of protest.

The postwar setting in Domenico’s story

World War II also supplies a chronological hinge in the narrative of Domenico’s family. After reading in the newspaper that Monsignor McNulty has died, Domenico learns that Father Guglielmo has been named acting pastor of St. Mary of Jesus Christ Church, the church’s first Italian pastor. Domenico welcomes both McNulty’s death and Guglielmo’s promotion, and he recalls that he had no quarrel with Guglielmo, whom he regarded as subordinate to the other priest. The news of the appointment leads directly to Guglielmo’s visit to the boardinghouse, where he asks after Domenico’s wife and daughter.

Domenico initially treats the visit as a possible attempt to persuade him to have his daughter baptized. Two years have passed since her birth, and he remains unwilling to agree, despite pressure from people around him. The passage dates this family dispute by saying that the war against the Germans has been fought and won; it also notes that American Woolen and Textile has dyed the wool for sailors’ coats. These details anchor the episode in a changed postwar moment without turning it into a battle narrative. The end of the war and the production of military clothing sit alongside the continuing, intimate question of whether the child will be christened.

Historical distance and recurrence

Across these episodes, World War II appears in distinct narrative times: as Ray’s past, as the source of a knife kept in the family home, and as a marker for events in Domenico’s postwar life. The novel does not make those references equivalent. For Ray, the war is part of his veteran identity; for Thomas, its material remnant becomes an instrument in a later emergency; in Domenico’s story, the war’s end helps place domestic and religious conflicts in time. Together, these uses make history present not through a sustained account of combat but through what remains afterward: a souvenir, a remembered political outlook, a newspaper’s interpretation of another crisis, and the ordinary work of rebuilding life after war.