A strong-back glanc’ offen your ’ead, an’ I harl you board dis raff.” TimothyĪt the time of this dialogue, the speaker is identified by Philip in his narration only as “the Negro.” Soon enough, of course, he introduces himself as Timothy. “You ’ad a mos’ terrible crack on d’ead, bahss. War has a way of impacting people who may be thousands of miles from the closest battlefield and several novels of note use war in the distance as stimulus for a coming-of-age tale like The Cay. With this opening narrative begins another entry into a time-honored sub-genre of fiction: the coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of war. The narrator of this story is Philip Enright and he is not yet even into his teens at the time of the German assault upon the South American coast. It is still early in 1942, barely two months after the United States was pulled into the already-ongoing European conflict when Japanese planes launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The novel commences with the arrival of German submarines off the coast of Venezuela. I remember that on that moonless night in February 1942, they attacked the big Lago oil refinery on Aruba, the sister island west of us. I was asleep on the second floor of our narrow, gabled green house in Willemstad, on the island of Curaçao, the largest of the Dutch islands just off the coast of Venezuela. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
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