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Fallen Angels

 Walter Dean Myers
 

Key Facts

 
full title  · Fallen Angels
 
author  · Walter Dean Myers
 
type of work  · Novel
 
genre  · Coming-of-age story; historical fiction; war fiction
 
language  · English
 
time and place written  · 1988; Jersey City, New Jersey.
 
date of first publication  · 1988
 
publisher  · Scholastic Inc.
 
narrator  · Richie Perry, a young African-American soldier in the Vietnam War
 
point of view  · Richie tells the story in the first person, giving us immediate, intimate access to his thoughts and feelings as the action unfolds.
 
tone  · Richie speaks with immediacy and poignancy, baring his innermost fears and thoughts. He filters the action of the novel through the medium of these emotions and ideas.
 
tense  · Past
 
setting (time)  · Several months in 1967 and 1968
 
setting (place)  · Vietnam
 
protagonist  · Richie Perry
 
major conflict  · Richie struggles to come to terms with the grim reality of war, which contradicts the myths about war that he believed going into it.
 
rising action  · Richie's enlistment in the army to escape a bleak future; the misplacement of Richie's medical file, and his resulting assignment to Vietnam; Richie's burgeoning friendship with Peewee, Jenkins, and Johnson; the soldiers' journey to their camp near Chu Lai.
 
climax  · Richie's success in drafting a truthful letter to his brother that discusses honestly the unromantic and gruesome nature of combat.
 
falling action  · The poorly planned mission on which the squad is sent; Peewee and Richie's separation from the rest of the squad; Peewee and Richie's quick thinking to save the lives of Monaco and the rest of the squad; Peewee's and Richie's getting wounded in the battle.
 
themes  · The loss of innocence; the unromantic reality of war; the moral ambiguity of war
 
motifs  · Race; friendship; heroism
 
symbols  · Richie's letters home; the lost dog tags; war movies
 
foreshadowing  · The army's failure to process Richie's medical file properly hints that Richie will not receive a medical discharge and will have to fight; the army's bureaucratic mix-up at the airport in Osaka previews the general chaos of war and the ineffectiveness of trying to control that chaos.
 
 
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