Nude Interrogation (Critique 1)

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Nude Interrogation – Yusef Komunyakaa

A young man and woman about to engage in sex, a great opening to catch a reader's attention, yet this story isn't as simple as Angelica taking off her skirt and making love while Hendrix plays in the background. This short story is about the emotions to be felt (or not felt) returning home after the atrocities of war, the emptiness of knowing you have experienced something “they” can't understand. As Angelica slowly takes off her clothes in front of our unnamed male in the story, it is anything but erotic.

It becomes obvious she is of the “they” who cannot understand. She pours him with questions of his experiences in the war (I believe that the first set of dialogue in italics are her words), Did you kill anyone? Did you dig a hole, crawl inside, and wait for your target? Then she drops her skirt, mini of course. Angelica is completely unaware of the male's feeling of disconnect from the whole situation. Judging from the description of the room they are in, incense, Hendrix, blacklight, and cinder block bookcase, I would call it a safe bet to say they are young, most likely in a dorm room. Oh, excuse me, “Residence Hall.” 

This young man has returned from a war (Vietnam would be my guess) and is attempting to go back to a normal life, make love to a beautiful girl, forget the war. Clearly from the man's lack of responses, his mind only races back to what he has seen. Though we, the readers, get nothing concrete from the story as to what exactly he had done. He eventually answers her (I believe the last set of italics to be his words), he tells her yes, but from his first word, his thoughts merge to loss, emptiness. 

The man feels nothing for this girl, they make love and he lies there, not speaking. He was silent, the night was quiet, and he couldn't stop looking at the sky (his thoughts now in italics), his mind was somewhere between laying next to a woman he just made love to and being in the war, maybe dealing with the thought that he has killed a man, but he is neither with her, nor physically in the war, but his thoughts, at least for the night described in the story, are in the war.