Eleven - Ambush

So my first question about this chapter while reading it was simply "What's the point of this chapter?" Virtually no new information was given, aside from the brief little anecdote about his daughter in the first paragraph where she asks him "You keep writing these war stories, so I guess you must have killed somebody" (p. 124). So I got to thinking that the little anecdote was probably pretty significant, as it was the only really new thing he added in this chapter. And I suppose that's when I realized that maybe I didn't really get the point of this chapter because O'Brien simply wasn't writing to me. And he wasn't writing to you either, dear reader (oh ho, look at me break that fourth wall). This chapter was written to his daughter, and nobody else. I suppose his reasoning is that he might not always be around to tell her the truth about the war, but at the time he was writing this book, she was too young to understand. So he wrote this chapter specifically for her, and put it in this book, in the hopes that she would one day read it when she has grown up. Pretty sly, O'Brien.

It's my birthday today. Happy birthday, me.