A Late Encounter with the Enemy

“A Late Encounter With the Enemy” explores its central theme of Modernity and the Fetishization of the Past through various techniques. The story structure, language, and settings are fragmented, thus resisting narrative progression within the story itself. However, this lack of narrative progression mirrors the lack of moral progress made by the story’s central characters. Both Sally and her grandfather actively prefer fantasy to reality, and their delusions prevent them from seeing either themselves or one another clearly. Sally views her grandfather as a symbol of her own nobility. Her most urgent desire is that he should stay alive long enough to sit on the stage at her graduation, in his military uniform, so that all her peers and mentors can witness her connection to the glorious Southern past. She imagines holding her head high as if to say, “See him! See him! My kin, all you upstarts!” (154). The repeated exhortation, “See him!” suggests a motif in this story as, again and again, appearance takes the place of reality. The story presents Vanity as an Obstacle to Grace, as Sally remains unable or unwilling to see her grandfather as anything other than a reflection of her own importance.