The World Played Chess

“The world, it seemed, had been busy playing chess, / While I had played checkers […] and ignored the rest.”

These lines from a poem written by Vincent in 1979 recall William’s telling Vincent that he knew nothing about war—that while the world was engaged in a serious game of warfare, a boy like Vincent was playing trivial games. That Vincent writes these lines at age 18 shows him to have internalized William’s comment and the fundamental flaw in his reasoning: War was not Vincent’s reality, but then war, power struggles, people using people for their own aims are facts of life at any time, and this is what the title of the novel, which ignores the second line of the poem, highlights.

“Someone once said that failure is easier to live with than regret, and it pierced my heart like an arrow. Dreams are hard to catch, aren’t they? Especially if you don’t have the courage to try.”

In this quote, Dugoni uses Vincent’s regrets over his unpursued dreams as a general statement about human ambition. Everyone has dreams, but it’s easier to have a dream than it is to realize that dream. But it isn’t failing that hurts, it’s not trying. This hits Vincent to the core because he did not try to pursue his dreams of becoming a writer, so he is filled with unfulfilled regret.

“Because William taught me that you can’t expect to be treated as a man if you act like a child, and that every life is precious and can be lost in an instant of stupidity or bad luck. He taught me not to waste the opportunities I had, because so many young men never had a chance at them, never had the chance to grow old.”

In Chapter 1, Dugoni underscores the lessons that William teaches Vincent, and this didactic strain continues throughout the novel as Vincent passes on these lessons to his son.

“Though young, he had a smoker’s voice, deep and gravelly, to go with the wrinkles and the spots of gray in his hair and moustache.”

This physical description of William in 1979 characterizes him as a man who looks older than his years. The traumas of the Vietnam War have had a long-lasting effect on William. He is wiser than his years, but the physical manifestations of stress, such as gray hair, wrinkles, and a smoker’s voice, emphasize the toll the war continues to have on William.

“Graduation had done what none of us would do on our own; it had shattered our glass illusion of who we were. Everything that had happened in high school was now in my past, and none of it would matter to the people I would meet in college.”

The beginning of Vincent’s coming-of-age story starts with the revelation that the safety, security, and familiarity of his high school life is over. A new and unfamiliar chapter has opened for Vincent, but he doesn’t know what will happen. High school, which had a profound impact on how Vincent views himself and identifies himself, is over. With this chapter closing, Vincent is in a gray area, somewhat at a loss as to who he is and who he will become.

“When William spoke of Vietnam, he was like a live electrical wire I had gripped. His stories sent a current through my body. But then, just as quickly, William flipped a switch and the current turned off, leaving me drained and tired.”

William’s stories about Vietnam electrify Vincent. He feels the shock of William’s experiences. This quote thus emphasizes Vincent’s empathy, while also suggesting that strength of the feelings Vincent has from the stories pales in comparison to the feelings he experienced at the time and then experiences again in describing them.

“William had told me the only difference between him and all those young men who died in Vietnam was bad luck. They took one step in the wrong place, stuck their head up at the wrong time, got on the wrong chopper, or slept in the wrong bunker.”

One of the central lessons of this novel concerns the arbitrary nature of war and by extension the arbitrary difference between life and death. If there is anything redeeming about this state of affairs it is that William learns to live in the moment and while that doesn’t guarantee anything, it does help him survive. But whereas bad luck is a fact of war, it need not be in everyday life. Death in a drunk-driving accident seems pointless and random, but it is the result of decisions people have made, not only the vagaries of chance.

“I tried to remember what it had been like for me, turning eighteen and being an adult chronologically, but nowhere close mentally. I used to blame my underdeveloped frontal cortex for all the stupid things I did, but it was just immaturity. As my father had once said, if you want to be treated like an adult, then act like one. Easier said than done for young men at eighteen.”

Adolescence is difficult largely because teenagers are on the brink of full independence but are still childish in many ways and therefore unprepared for that independence. Here, Dugoni utilizes the older Vincent’s point-of-view as he watches his son go through the same coming-of-age lessons that all young men on the cusp of adulthood endure, while also recognizing that the advice his own father gave him may not have been particularly effective because the point is not to act like an adult, but to become an adult.

“A man of few words when it came to these things, my father was no dummy. He knew I drank. He knew my older brother drank. Handing me a beer in front of my friends was his way of telling me he no longer thought of me as a child, but also that he would hold me to a higher standard and expect me to live up to that standard.”

In this quote, Vincent highlights a major moment in his coming-of-age story. The act of the father passing the beer to his son and his friends is an acknowledgment of their growing maturity. It is not a free ticket to partying. On the contrary, in handing his son a beer, Vincent’s father hands over responsibility for drinking to his son in a way that both shows the respect of the father for his son and the ability of the father to let go.

“I am like the pencil I constantly sharpen with a knife; I am just a dull nub of the person I was.”

Here, William finds himself in a contradictory state: He has to be constantly sharp, constantly aware while in Vietnam, but he also has the self-awareness to realize that honing those aspects of himself that help him survive deaden the full human being he was before the war.

“I think we fancied ourselves as our own rat pack. We weren’t famous, had no real discernable talent, but we hung out together in bars making asinine comments and usually drank more than we should. It was hard for me to admit, but it was getting old. I didn’t want to be working just to have enough money to go drink beer and play softball when I was thirty.”

Another important moment in Vincent’s character development is when he becomes bored with his and his high school friends’ usual goings on. What was fun only a few weeks earlier suddenly seems foolish. This is the beginning of Vincent’s growing independence and maturity. In this quote, Vincent identifies the moment when behaving carelessly and irresponsibly stopped being fun or interesting to him, which essentially means that the boys he held as important friends became uninteresting to him as well.

“We began the inevitable process that night of drifting apart, going our separate ways, to live our separate lives. At least we had that chance.”

It can be sad to drift away from your friends and create lives away from the people you thought were intimately important to you. At the same time, this rite of passage is a privilege unavailable to young men like William, as the adult Vincent now recognizes. He and his friends could go their own ways, make their own choices, giving up high school friendships, but not their lives.

“William didn’t think about consequences, about his past, or about his future. He stayed in the present. I assumed the present was difficult enough.”

In this quote, Vincent sees that William cannot look forward or backward, beyond the moment he is living in. Whereas some people aspire to live in the moment, because thinking too much about the future or dwelling too much over the past can make them miss the beauty of their present, William is trapped in a present in which past trauma is replayed over and over and any future seems to be foreclosed.

“I knew William had lost his faith and his belief in God. He said God had abandoned him and the other marines when they needed him most. He said he’d been to hell, and nothing in eternal damnation could be worse than what he experienced in Vietnam.”

In Part 4, Dugoni explores William’s fractured relationship with God and the loss of faith caused by a feeling of being abandoned to the hell of war: It is not God who abandons the soldiers to their fate, but the US government. Either way, though, after facing a war as horrific as the Vietnam War, William has nothing else to fear and therefore can no longer respect ideas of heaven or hell.

“I didn’t know enough about life, or the world, to have any meaningful or knowledgeable opinions about anyone or anything, which I believe is why William talked to me. He didn’t have to maintain his pride or protect his image. I wasn’t his parent or his priest, so he had no obligation to confess. I didn’t judge him, so he had no reason to be defensive. I didn’t expect him to be anyone, so he had no reason to be anyone but himself.”

This quote characterizes Vincent as an empathetic listener. Not many people would have listened to William’s stories about Vietnam. The stories themselves are disturbing, and they can exhaust the mind and heart. William and Vincent become close because of Vincent’s empathy. Vincent doesn’t judge William for his gruffness, his violence, his past, or his opinions. Vincent can’t offer any advice, first because William is clearly not asking for any and secondly because Vincent is too young and inexperienced to have anything of substance to reply to William with. This is ideal for William, who needs a listener and not a preacher. Thus, their relationship is formed and nurtured because Vincent is young, inexperienced, kind, and empathetic.

“That’s the hardest part about death. It’s permanent. It’s final. But Chris will not have died for nothing if you learn just one thing from his death, if you learn that life is fragile at any age, and that every day is a gift. His death won’t be for nothing if you learn to celebrate each morning that you wake, take a breath, and realize you’re still alive and the day is filled with endless potential.”

A prominent message in this novel, spoken by Vincent in this case, is to live life to the fullest in honor of those who weren’t so fortunate. This is true for all three central male characters in this novel. William must learn to live his life well because so many men his age were killed before they could truly experience what else life had to offer. It’s a life lesson that Vincent can pass down to his son in the aftermath of Chris’s death. Grief can be obsessive, but the grievers must continue to live because otherwise, they would be wasting a gift their deceased loved ones did not get.

“It was just time for Beau to go. And it was time for Elizabeth and me to let him go. Time to let him live through his own experiences and grow up. It was time to let him find the man he would become, the type of man he wanted to be, the type of person he wanted to be. I realized no one was better suited to choose what was best for Beau than Beau. And I took some pride in that.”

Beau’s narrative is the third coming-of-age story in the novel. In this quote, Vincent reflects on the sadness of parents letting their children go, the necessity of their doing so that their children can continue to grow, and ultimately the pride of knowing that they have prepared their children to be confident and to take charge in the next formative chapter of their lives.

“I felt uneasy in the car with him. After weeks working beside him every day, I felt like I didn’t know him, not really. I knew a facade, the guy William wanted me to see. He didn’t want me to see the guy clearly in pain.”

In this quote, Vincent expresses fear over William’s erratic and violent behavior, but also demonstrates his characteristic empathy and compassion in recognizing that William puts up a wall to hide his vulnerability and his pain.

“Don’t worry about me. I’m a survivor. Worry about yourself. You don’t know shit. The world is playing chess and you’re playing checkers. It’s going to piss all over you.”

At this moment, William treats Vincent as a child, not a friend, as a naive youngster, not a companion. It’s true that the world is a tough place, but this remark pertains more to William at age 18 than to Vincent at the same age. It is William who finds himself in a world in which he is a pawn; unlike William, Vincent will have a chance to mature and fend for himself.

“Nobody looked at me long enough for me to speak. I was not real. I was a ghost. I was an imitation of the young man who left this town. I’d had no time to decompress. Nothing to prepare me for my return to civilian life.”

When William returns to the United States, he undergoes reverse culture shock. He has trauma from the events of the war and is no longer the person he was. Ironically, William, who has served his country, returns to find not only his country to be strange but also himself to be estranged from his former self.

“A boy whose humanity, values, and sense of himself as a moral, righteous person had all been compromised. The war took that from me, more than anything else that it stole.”

In this quote, William reflects on his youth and identifies the damage of war on the young psyche. William lost a lot in the war, but the most profound loss was the loss of self. Losing his moral code is like losing his humanity. War dehumanized William, which made him resentful and unable to move forward with his life. This quote highlights the importance of ensuring that soldiers are given proper and thorough psychological care.

“Everyone’s past contains things we are not proud of, skeletons in our closets that we do not share, not with strangers and not with those we love and who love us. We fear that to do so will change their perception of us, and their belief in who we are.”

The human experience is complex, messy, and at times necessarily secretive. William has his fair share of secrets because of what he endured in the war and how little people who haven’t endured the same tribulations can understand him. But everyone has secrets. This is an important point in humanizing William despite the atrocity he committed. William has a chance of redemption, and sharing his deepest, darkest secret is the way to begin to make good on that chance.

“Boys that age are too easily forgotten. We simply expect them to pass from their teenage years into manhood, with all its responsibilities, without any help. It’s a tough transition.”

This novel is essentially about the moment when boys turn into men, all at once, as in William’s case, or over time, as is the case for Vincent and Beau. But while they are not propelled forward by trauma the way that William is, the transition from boyhood to masculinity is still difficult in a way that society does not necessarily acknowledge. This quote is thus Dugoni’s way of reaching out to his reader to consider the importance of supporting boys emotionally through puberty and into young adulthood.