Bridging the Various Sections of Cambodia

Bridging the Various Sections of Cambodia, A book for people who find television too slow

An argument is most effective when the sum of its total arrives at something greater than the sum of its parts. By challenging the novel's traditional structure and purpose, Brian Fawcett's Cambodia, A book for people who find television too slow demonstrates this point masterfully. Considered on their own, the novel's thirteen short stories of the top section and continuing narrative of the bottom section offer both insightful conclusions on the inner workings of our social structures and shocking factual data on what we have done in the name of these structures. However, the thrust of Fawcett's work is not to offer statistics and truisms about our capacity for greed and the evils of television, nor is it to shed light on government conspiracy. Fawcett is after something much more concrete in Cambodia. He states his position explicitly in the following, "Cambodia is the subtext of the Global Village, and that the Global Village has had its purest apotheosis yet in Cambodia."(Fawcett 54) To understand this, the reader must consider how, by using recurring motifs and imagery throughout the numerous settings of the novel, Fawcett is systematically building his argument. Fawcett suggests that the control exerted on society through the mass media of the Global Village is simply the latest manifestation of an imperial spirit that has followed humanity throughout history. Furthermore, Fawcett posits that the nature and severity of this control is such that it parallels the events of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. Fawcett's novel strives to inspire reflection, question, and ultimately action in two unique ways. In a literal sense, the words of the book achieve what it strives for by presenting interrelated observations and arguments on themes of imperialism, the Global Village, and self-determination. In a conceptual sense, Fawcett's writing and the book itself...