Cara’s Blog

I found Born On the Fourth of July to be fascinating and powerful. The first thing that struck me about the reading was Kovic’s use of literary techniques. For most of the reading, the author writes in 1st person, but for selected passages Kovic switches to 2nd person. He writes in 2nd person first in chapter two where he discusses the hospital in New York where he was sent and when he first sees his parents. The second time he uses this devise is when he enters boot camp. I believe that the author might have chosen to change person here because these were times where he felt like his life was in the hands of someone else such as the nurses or his drill sergeant.

I noticed that there were a number of religious references that might be useful to examine. The opening scene in the book is the chaos of a battle. The men are crying for Jesus and their mothers. On pages 39 Kovic says that he stayed in the hospital in Vietnam for “seven days and seven nights,” a common length of time repeatedly used in the bible. The author also describes his Catholic upbringing and how influences his childhood. He said that when he was a kid that he “loved God more than anything else in the world and [that he] prayed to Him and the Virgin Mary and Jesus and all the saints to be a good boy and a good American.”