38 pages • 1 hour read
Patricia McCormickNever Fall Down
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Khmer Rouge’s Use of Propaganda and Mind Control
Besides physical brutality, the most important means the Khmer Rouge use to control the country are propaganda and mind control. They boast that rice yields are better than ever and that workers sing joyful songs in the fields when in reality both the rice and the workers are dying. When a poor yield is acknowledged, it is not due to overworking the soil and poor planning by the leaders, but because of the laziness and bad character of the workers. When the war begins, the country’s official radio station proclaims that Democratic Kampuchea is routing the Vietnamese; in reality, the Khmer Rouge are losing more ground every day. The soldiers in the camps never tell anyone outright that they are going to be executed; they ask them to help move a cart stuck in the mud or that they are going to get some medicine.
Year Zero is a concept the Khmer Rouge use to indicate that 1975 is the first year in the country’s new history. Arn hears the term for the first time in the children’s work camp: “Every day, the Khmer Rouge tell us we have to forget the past. This is Year Zero, they say; nothing has come before. All past knowledge is illegal” (43). Thinking is called “a disease of the mind”; people must only love Angka (43). Arn starts to believe that Angka and the Khmer Rouge can read his mind, which means he has to hide true feelings or risk execution. The Khmer Rouge separate families and focus on indoctrinating the children. Arn never believes their propaganda but at one point he does believe the Khmer Rouge have succeeded in erasing his memory of his family.
Violence, Loss, and Death
A child’s life is supposed to be filled with family, friends, and an environment in which they can learn and grow. Arn spends his childhood years, from age eleven to fifteen, under the control of Khmer Rouge, a regime that tries to kill him and break his spirit at every turn. As Arn navigates life under the Khmer Rouge, the only constants in his life are violence, loss, and death. He often refers to death as an old friend and wishes to die when his physical and emotional suffering reach a point he can no longer bear.
The novel contains many characters who appear in and disappear from Arn’s life. We meet Arn’s family members at the beginning of the novel, but Arn is separated from them when he is moved to the child labor camp. Arn makes friends in the camp, but when the war begins two years later, he is separated from them, too. Arn knows by this point not to get too attached to others because he sees people disappear and die on a daily basis. We only learn the first names of the people Arn meets under the Khmer Rouge. The constant loss of those he cares about is one of the hallmarks of Arn’s experience.
The Khmer Rouge make Arn participate in violence. When Arn is in the labor camp, the soldiers make him complicit in their executions by making him bury and urinate on the bodies. This form of forced complicity is a tactic the Khmer Rouge use to induct children into their ranks. The Khmer Rouge raise the level of violence Arn must commit until he becomes one of them.
Luck, Survivor’s Guilt, and Witness
Arn is adept at reading situations; he knows when to keep his head down and when to assert himself. But no amount of intelligence, cunning or willpower can guarantee his survival during the genocide. Arn realizes that he is lucky to have escaped death during the relocation, in the camps, and on the battlefield. This luck becomes more difficult for Arn to deal with when he arrives in the refugee camp, because he cannot understand why Peter Pond chooses to adopt him after all the atrocities he has committed.
Arn’s survivor’s guilt does not allow him to see himself as the victim. He does not think about the fact that he had no choice under the Khmer Rouge and that he was forced to commit violence or be killed himself. Though the reader can see the progressive toll the genocide has on Arn’s psyche, Arn refuses to pity himself. If he could, Arn would give his life for all the lives he took and all the others he could not save.
On multiple occasions, Peter Pond tells Arn he is the “chosen one,” who can help tell Cambodia’s story. In doing so, Peter is offering Arn a chance to witness: to transform his own experience by sharing it with others. Arn has a perspective no one else has and a story no one else can tell. In bearing public witness to his personal experience of the genocide, by being honest about the things he did and the things that were done to him, Arn finds a path to redemption and a way to keep his promise to help those who were left behind.
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By Patricia McCormick
