The Occupation of France through the eyes of Irne Nmirovsky in Suite Franaise - Dissertation Example

Irene Nemirovsky’s book, Suite francaise, written in two sections, ‘Storm in June’ and ‘Dolce,’ starts with an air raid siren going off in the early morning hours before sunrise, yet people are still not so anxious as of yet that they feel they must run away (Nemirovsky 3). (Indeed, many went back to sleep for just a bit longer once the sirens stopped.) Yet, in the distance, there was the sound of heavy guns firing, some of it coming closer and closer. Finally, the sun comes up and the shelling stops.

There is a peaceful, yet uncertain pause in the craziness. Something is just waiting around the corner, yet to be seen (Nemirovsky 4). In this glimpse of the novel, we are made aware of the fact that people just barely understand what is happening to them and really cannot believe any rumours and reports they have been getting about the German forces moving their way or that things could be that bad (Nemirovsky 5). As is so often seen, when changes are made within a society coming from the outside, people do not want to believe that they are in danger.

It is a case of pulling the night mask over one’s eyes so as to wake up and find that everything is alright again and back to normal. In fact, in the novel, this is the beginning of the end of whatever normal they had in their lives. It is a down-hill spiral from that point onwards. Suite francaise presents a number of people in all their diverse personalities, set in a time that will turn to a future of unimaginable horror. At the period of time that Irene writes this book, many of the horrors committed by the Nazis are still unknown definitively to most outside of the European theatre of war, but there had been rumours.

Indeed, Irene may have suspected or heard through the rumour mill about what was truly happening to the Jews, of which she was one. Most, however, did not want to believe that such things were happening and it would not be until the end of WWII that the truth of the genocide of the Jewish people and other ‘undesirables’ would be fully revealed and even then, some would not believe it did take place. The background in the novel therefore provides a scenario which is perceived by the characters as they would have known their own world for that time when people did not know that much about what was happening, only that there was a war going on.

In our current age of the Internet and social media of modern times, information and news travel around the world in a flash, within seconds or even milliseconds. At the beginning of WWII, however, information would have taken far more time to be dispersed to the general population in varying levels of electronic access by radio. Under the German occupation, much of that news would have been restricted and also turned to propaganda before being released to the general public. Therefore, her characters also react accordingly to what they know at that point in time of occurring history, not what we know in our perspective of that history many decades later.

Regarding these two points of view, we see what is coming for these people but we can only shout silently to deaf ears of the characters in this story because they are not there yet in that level of knowledge. The time we know of through historical documentation, has not yet occurred for them or if it is occurring, they do not know of it yet, while we, who are in the future, already know where the story is headed, at least