44 pages • 1 hour read
Forge
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Themes
The Realities of the Revolutionary War
Forge offers many realistic portrayals of the Revolutionary War, both in terms of richly researched historical specificity, and artful and terrifying descriptions of the grim, violent horrors of war itself.
Nearly the entirety of Part II of the novel is dedicated to the slow, arduous construction of the Colonial encampment at Valley Forge. Narrated through Curzon’s point of view, we are given descriptions not only of the planning of Washington’s fabled huts, but also their tedious and agonizing construction. We experience the chaos of being an untrained boy forced to construct shelter while winter crashes in. We feel the weight of the fallen trees, the exhaustion of building shelter, the cold and the hunger, and the sorry lengths to which our ancestors went in order to feed themselves, most notablythe actual process of cooking and eating firecake.
For a period of American history often lost amid the clouds of our own mythmaking, Forge provides an unflinching view of what life at that time might really have felt like, not only in terms of the campbut also the genuine horror of warfare. Eben’s showdown with the redcoat in the early moments of Part I ends with the redcoat shot through the gut, and dying in slow, wrenching agony. The descriptions of that violence, immediately followed by the description of the following skirmish, present warfare without the heady glow of nobility and heroism. The battle is a frantic mess of gunfire and smoke. Curzon survives more out of luck than skill or bravery. Men scream and men die while musketballs slam into the earth, kicking up clouds of dirt. In every sense, Forge is focused on serious and somber authenticity.
Racism and Slavery in “Free” America
There is an immense juxtaposition at the center of this novel. At once we see the American creation myth unfolding before us, occurring specifically during the much-fabled days of hardship and heroism at Valley Forge, but that story is being told to us by a young man who will not ever truly know the freedom—or at least the legal recognition of that freedom–in his lifetime.
While America is a symbol for freedom and liberty, there remained gross inequities that were not addressed until long, long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the most heinous of which is American slavery. Anderson goes to considerable lengths to challenge the sunny mythology of the American War for Independence by providing intimate details of life at that time, and through the inclusion of characters who fall along a kind of moral and social spectrum in regard to the issue of slavery.
Bellingham is no doubt an essential lens onto the extent to which slavery has infested nascent American independence. He arrives at camp from York, accompanying members of the Continental Congress—delegates from the 13 original colonies who served as the interim government for a burgeoning America. Before there was an Executive or Legislative branch, before there was a President, there was this governing body of delegates. And it’s with those men that Bellingham arrives, serves, and even plots to ascend to greater power. Bellingham’s presence and function in the novel easily represents the extent to which racist inequity is a cornerstone of early American society.
Identity Revealed through Hardship
In Chapter XXIV, the descriptions of the hardships enduredat Valley Forge are well underway. The cold and hard conditions, paired with the lack of resources and borderline starvation, pushed the Continental Army to the breaking point. The men gather to watch a man be hanged for attempting to break his friends out of jail, and together flee the camp and the entire American campaign. Of course, things are so shabby and resources are so scarce that even the rope is so frayed and ragged that it snaps when they first attempt to hang him.
Curzon’s recapture establishes finally his absolute refusal to accept enslavement, as he expresses when recalling the myth of Prometheus. Curzon has suffered violence, terror, enslavement, and near starvation, and the result is a man who knows himself, and what he is willing to do, in order to achieve his own, best destiny.
Eben, too, is forced to hammer out his truest self. It’s clear from his and Curzon’s argument that Eben, like so many people, has inherited his views about slavery and his notion of what’s appropriate or moral from his family, and harbors a limited and unintentionally privileged worldview. As they fight, Curzon forces him to consider ideas that challenge his safe preconceptions, and Eben shuts down. He’s unprepared to hear the hard truths Curzon must face every day. It’s only after that fight, and his ensuing fight with Burns, that Eben is prepared to understand the real meaning and significance of the liberty he is fighting for.
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By Laurie Halse Anderson
