Carolyn Forche The Colonel Summary

The reader of this poem enters the home of a highly-ranked military man in El Salvador, with a civil war taking place right outside. Carolyn Forche starts off this intriguing piece with a powerful first sentence. “What you have heard is true” (Forche 1). She establishes early that this piece is going to be quite an interesting tale, perhaps something that would be hard to believe. Initially, told fairly monotone, what we had “heard to be true” seems to be very regular and not too thought provoking. We subtly receive a hint of peculiarity through her random incorporation of the pistol on the cushion. Next we learn about the broken bottles embedded in the walls. Through quick sentences and odd foreshadowing, we soon come to believe that this foretold story is going to turn out a bit

The concept of leaping is massively apparent in The Colonel. It seems that Forche never settled on even one topic to magnify, she constantly progressed on with different descriptions of the setting. The use of a hurried, quick pace helped her effectively do this. This causes readers to be forced to wonder a bit as they attempt to fill in the gaps in such a peculiar description of setting, especially in The Colonel. Moving from the narrator being asked a question to a Spanish commercial, to the parrot speaking up on the terrace, the reader is required to put in some effort. “I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing” (Forche 12-18). This is just another way that Forche effectively fashioned Energy into her