Love and War in Alex La Guma’s “Thang’s Bicycle”

Abstract

This paper examines “Thang’s Bicycle,” a short story that the South African writer, Alex La Guma, sets in Vietnam in the middle of wars in the past and in the present. Little scholarly work has been done on this short story, and the paper seeks to bridge this gap using formalism as a theoretical framework in an endeavour to capture its literariness. How the writer constructs a literary work using resources of language reveals both its aesthetic dimensions and its ethical concerns. To plumb these artistic characteristics and moral depths, the formalist critic would need to interrogate how the literary work exploits aspects of fiction such as the narrative point of view, the story, the plot, and the characters and how the work realizes levels of language such as lexicon, phonology, syntax, and semantics. In the process, it discusses stylistic features and literary techniques that La Guma uses to portray beauty of love in the middle of the ugliness of war and violence. The paper argues that La Guma uses literary techniques associated with cinema to bring home this tragedy in which the bicycle in the tile is on the centre stage as a potent symbol.