Genocide and massacres are well-documented in the twentieth century.  Six million Jews and others were slaughtered by the Nazis in World War II.  Stalin  exterminated perhaps as many as 20 million in the Soviet Union.  The troops of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge executed as many as 3 million fellow Cambodians in the 1970's.  And only three hours by air from the United States, as many as 200,000 Maya and their supporters lost their lives in the 37 year-old civil war in Guatemala which did not end until a negotiated peace was settled in 1996.

Marshall Bennett Connelly, the pseudonym for an American writer deeply involved in the international human rights campaign in Guatemala, was drawn to the conflict after a teacher was murdered by death squads in Guatemala in 1980.  In "from 'Three Dirges,'" an excerpt from the opening of his epic novel, Requiem Guatemala, Connelly imaginatively recreates the horrific assassinations of five Guatemalan young men sentenced to die for teaching poor people how to read.  The "facts" of the incident are recorded in Penny Lernoux's opening chapter in People of God.  Her account of the 1982 slayings gains distance from her reportorial in style, while Connelly's short story, on the other hand, strips away any comfort afforded by Lernoux's journalism, and through the juxtaposition of perspective and time shifts, pulls the readers inextricably into the emotional matrix of the story.

Study Questions

1) Reconstruct the zigzag shifts in Connelly's use of time over the fifteen hours encompassed by the events of the story.  Why didn't Connelly adopt a more straight-forward, strictly sequential flow of events?  What does Connelly gain in manipulating time?

2) Just as Connelly jumps forward and backwards in the construction of time, so he shifts perspective--the angles from the the story is told.  Note the three different "camera angles" from which he reveals the action.  What are the effects of such shifts, and what could not be revealed so effectively at the end of the story in any other way?

3) Most stories feature a clearly defined protagonist, a character whose interests and sheer force of will direct the action of the story.  It might be argued that, perhaps ironically, "from 'Three Dirges'" reveals no protagonist.  If not, then what precipitates the action of the story, and what does that mean for any discernible theme or themes?

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This page was last modified on January 12, 2007,
and is maintained by Dr. Geoffrey Grimes.
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