SSRJ #2- "I am the Grass" by Daily Walker

    My initial reaction to the story was that this man, the narrator, was going to to be messed up for life. All the things he had done while in the war against the Vietnamese were traumatic and disturbing.  But it was interesting to see how the narrator coped with his guilt and anguish the things he had done.  The element that stood out to me the most was structure.
    Daily Walker illustrates through the structure of "I am the Grass" that forgiving yourself can be a difficult task. D. walker portrays a guilty conscience through the flashbacks of his past actions that are stimulated by the characters and settings he is exposed to. Through these flashbacks Walker causes the reader to be reminded, along with the narrator, that even when we go to great lengths to bury our guilt it always seems to come to the surface.  We are constantly reminded of whatever problems or actions that haunts us until we are able to let whatever it is go.  Walker uses the narrator's past actions in the Vietnam war as an antagonist  in the structure of the story to build the suspense, ultimately bringing us to a time in the narrator's life where he is suppressing his guilt through performing surgery on a Vietnamese war veteran.  The story builds to the climax of unwrapping the bandages the cushion the surgery site. The narrator appears to expect that through the success of this surgery as well as the several other surgeries he has performed for Vietnamese children will relinquish his guilt and memories of the war.  When to his surprise the graph does not take and the surgery was a failure, the narrator again re-accounts to the original incident; the loss of Dinh's thumbs. The narrator is troubled over the incident.  Just as we may feel once our personal suppressing thoughts and actions dissipate and we are left with guilt and remorse.  The narrator resolves his conflict on his flight out as he takes a tattered plane lacking seat-belts home.  He embraces the risky flight and accept life for whats ahead of him.  In these sense it would appear that the narrator was finally able to forgive himself and move on.  Though it was difficult he can now look forward instead of in his past.
   As I was considering the literary element of structure it was difficult not to cross over into other literary element such as imagery or character. What other aspects of structure did you find in "I am the Grass"?