When I Whistle by Shusaku Endo - Book Report/Review Example

When I Whistle, Shusaku Endo's narrative structure is apprehensive to draw a number of disturbing comparisons between the period of war and contemporary Japan. Shusaku's narrative structure is the inheritance of the war generation that explores the state of Japan that appeared from the destruction of World War II. This feature of the narrative structure is evident from the standard of living of Eiichi, the hardnosed young doctor of medicine of When I Whistle; unchanged by the disaster of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and incapable to see patients as anything but samples for own tests.

Eiichi lengthens the imperialistic desire of prewar Japan by taking no notice of the past and worshipping the present. The accretion of substance belongings is the only source of meaning for the new generation. This striking thematic element of the narrative structure of the novel is made further powerful by its persistent medicinal and hospital imagery. This characteristic of Endo's narrative structure was the result of chronic heart and lung problems that plagued him all through adult life.

For this reason, Endo has spent much time in hospitals; in the early 1960s, he experienced a series of major surgical operations, resulting in the removal of one lung. After World War II Japan came out in When I Whistle as one large tumor ward, the cancer of uncontrolled materialism incurable, the gesture of success a brief distraction in the face of godless perpetuity. When I Whistle examines the culture of modern Japan and meticulously the contrast between two generations, focusing on a father and son.

Endo alters the focus from the protagonist, Ozu, who is worried about the reminiscences of his adolescence, to his son Eiichi and his opportunistic medical career. Here Shusaku provides a panoramic approach of the very different moral visions animating the youthful men and women of the war years and their offsprings. The narrative structure shows the element of the influence of religion on the writer that as a Christian, Shusaku is a supporter for a set of values he considers is aboriginal to the West but distant to Japanese soil.

A convert who identifies the satire that Japan has turned out to be less spiritual as it has become more westernized. Further through the narrative structure, Shusaku constructs themes that generally revolve around a protagonist confronted with the remains of a native culture to which he is strained and by which he is revolted. Ozu is thus an exemplar of Shusaku Endo's despairing narrative structure of the postwar era-an an openhearted Japanese searching answers and getting only the resonance of the past.