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Chapter 7

Summary: Chapter 7, The Nature of Marriage

As a boy, John performs magic tricks. Sometimes he pretends he does true magic. He also performs mental tricks by imagining his dead father’s return. Later, when John meets Kathy in college, he knows his trick is to make her fall in love with him. No matter how much Kathy reassures John that she isn’t going anywhere, John, thinking of his father’s death, remains fearful that he will lose her.

John begins to spy on Kathy, watching her dorm window and tailing her around campus. He attempts to justify his actions by blaming Kathy’s independence and need for privacy. John soon learns intimate, personal details about her, and Kathy remarks that he knows her so well. As the couple makes plans to marry, John stops spying on Kathy. They dream about the future including John’s desire to attend law school and then become a politician. Kathy agrees with his plans, but when she asks why he wants to serve, his answer—to change things—strikes her as insincere. Even though John defends himself, claiming he wants to do good, he realizes he is drawn to politics because it involves manipulation.

After John graduates, he enlists in the military and is sent to Vietnam to serve in the war. Kathy writes him chatty letters about what’s going on at home. She also expresses concerns that John went to war to further his political future. John discounts this suggestion but does understand that serving in the military helps politicians.

John is a member of Charlie Company. His fellow soldiers call him “Sorcerer” because he performs tricks for them. Superstition rules in Vietnam and Sorcerer’s purported powers give the men something to believe in. They even touch John’s helmet for good luck. John cultivates this image of himself, telling Kathy about it, but she responds that tricks could make her disappear. When he receives this letter, the fear of losing Kathy returns, especially when she adopts a cooler, more distant tone in her next letter.

John also faces problems in Vietnam. The company loses several men to the enemy. Morale is low, and the men believe Sorcerer’s magic has worn off. John feels cut off from his company, Kathy, and the future. When a soldier in his company is shot dead by a sniper, John, moved by rage and other emotions, locates and beats the sniper. The company gathers a crowd of villagers to hang the sniper’s body publicly. The men consider John’s action, hanging or levitating the body, as his new trick.

John returns to Minneapolis almost two years later without alerting Kathy. He goes to campus and spies on her. While almost revealing himself on several occasions, John remains suspicious that Kathy has betrayed him. That night, he watches Kathy make a phone call, but then he loses her. He waits outside her dorm, but she doesn’t return until the next day. When Kathy sees John on the steps of the dorm, she says she was out.

John and Kathy get married and move into an apartment. Kathy tells him that she loves him. John, in his identity as Sorcerer, knows he must keep performing his tricks and guard his secrets.

Analysis: Chapter 7

Chapter 7 is much longer and weightier than those prior, which befits its function of introducing John and Kathy’s love story. This chapter ascribes John and Kathy’s tight and reciprocal bond to the tricks John uses to make Kathy love him forever. Whatever the impetus, Kathy loves John just as much as he loves her. Early on in their relationship, she reassures him that she has no plans to leave him, and when they marry, she confesses that she loves him so much that it’s scary.

The only time that Kathy pulls away from John is when he reverts to his role as Sorcerer. When John writes to her that the guys in his company believe he is the company witch doctor, Kathy doesn’t write back for several weeks and warns him to cut down on the tricks if he wants her to stay with him. Kathy grows distant, causing John to worry that she is dating other men. This explains why he reverts to his habit of spying on her, a practice that he had stopped in college once he became assured of her love. John doesn’t even tell Kathy he is returning to Minneapolis from the war because he wants to catch her in an act of betrayal. Despite his observing that she stayed out one night, they marry anyway. John is only able to do so because he can call on his Sorcerer identity when he gets uncomfortable with reality. For instance, it’s Sorcerer who believes Kathy when she says she was “out,” Sorcerer who honeymoons with Kathy and dispels any misgivings she has, and Sorcerer who moves into an apartment with her. From then on, the ever-vigilant Sorcerer is a presence in this marriage. Sorcerer can play tricks and keep John’s secrets about all the bad things he had seen and done in Vietnam.

This chapter also carries enormous significance in its placement of John in the Vietnam War. Here, amid chaos, death, and even tedium, Sorcerer was born. Sorcerer is a more finely realized version of the trickster John has played since childhood and the death of his father. The original trickster could make mice vanish or spy on his girlfriend, but this new, darker trickster has the power to keep men in combat alive. Having this nickname matters to John. It makes John feel part of the group, and it also is a source of pride, particularly so because John was the subject of constant teasing from his father. The persona Sorcerer also makes John feel immensely powerful, both because the men look up to him and because they believe his prophecies about life, death, and war. This persona, however, is the identity that threatens his relationship with Kathy. Not only does she love John as himself, not a trickster, but Sorcerer scares her. The fact that John continues to call himself and think of himself as Sorcerer, even when he knows that Sorcerer alienates Kathy, shows how little John can control himself when faced with the horror and violence he saw in Vietnam.

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