The actor, Michael Caine, discussing how he went about delivering an emotionally challenging line, noted that a director once told him to “use the difficulty”.
That, for me, is what comes through in the powerfully told stories The Death of Captain Waskow and A Father’s Memories of Auschwitz; when the author or speaker embraces an emotion such as sadness or anger and channels it through their words to help their reader or listener share their experience and want to listen through to the end.
Ernie Pyle sets up his story “The Death of Captain Waskow” by introducing his reader to a much-loved man and uses vivid imagery, quotes from the captain’s heart-broken soldiers and his own endearing recollection of Captain Waskow to convey his sense of anguish and shame and the senselessness of war. The reader is caught by Pyle’s difficulty in processing what he sees and feels going on around him because Pyle so effectively juxtaposes light against dark, anger against tenderness and life against death.
Debra Fisher uses her “difficulty” with vivid imagery of her father’s angry expression, the description of his physique and his strong physical response in preparing to tell her his story of Auschwitz. She includes the imagery her father used to warn her against entering the “room” where the truth lay. The listener hears the emotion in her voice as she relates these things although the powerful juxtaposition of her wanting to hear the truth and her father’s reluctance to share it, her father’s frail body and his forceful physical reaction to kicking off his covers as if he were kicking down the door to a room are also present in her words.
