Comparative Analysis of ‘Fish Stories’ and ‘Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain’

Both “Fish Stories” by Janika Oza and “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” by Jamil Jan Kochai depict a tale combining trauma/mortality/family relationships. The mother in “Fish Stories” is shown grieving for her dead son and begins to hallucinate him being alive.

However, Jamil Jan Kochai presents the protagonist of “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain” as seeing his deceased uncle in the video game he bought rather than experiencing hallucinations of him. The recurring theme of death shows how the experience of losing a loved one may leave one feeling disconnected from reality and with an unending sense of loss. Due to societal and familial bonds, death is considered tragic and unpleasant in individuals. Losing a loved one may result in a break from reality as well as the severing of past ties. In both cases, members of the family are left for independent survival and with conflicting emotions to deal with.

In Janika Oza’s work, in her narrative “Fish Stories,” a grieving mother who lost a son to a thunderstorm encounters her son. The writer’s use of different emotions throughout the story enables the reader to understand more about her son’s eerie memories. Whilst the mother laments the loss of her deceased son, the daughter does not share her belief that he is still alive. The narrator uses figurative language to convey a variety of death links throughout the novel. Near the end of the story, the metaphorical language symbol is utilized, the meal that the narrator’s

mother prepared is overlooked, and “in the morning we had found bugs feasting on the corn, an upturned fly floating in the orange grease, its belly swollen, glutted” (Oza). An upside-down fly floating in the soup is used as the quotation’s symbol and stands in for the narrator’s sibling drowning. The solemn usage of the sign emphasizes the terrible demise of the brother and the mother’s devastated thoughts after his departure. When the mother tells her daughter, “He also had to swim so far to get here” (Oza), the author employs sarcasm to imply that she thinks her brother must have gone home due to the storm.“He can’t swim, I said” (Oza), the daughter argues that her brother cannot swim and “had drowned when we first came to this country” (Oza). This remark is an example of irony despite the mother’s insistence that he has learned to swim to return home.

The ties between the surviving family members start to fray in “Fish Stories” after the death of the brother. Hallucinations and maybe even a mental breakdown set in as the mother grieves, leading her to believe that her own son has come home. The daughter starts to refute the idea that he is back at home. She starts to enumerate the characteristics of the boy she once knew as she pushes the memory of him when she remembers “glasses round and thick, framing eyes whose lashes I never stopped envying, a checkered shirt or perhaps his Manchester United polo, a missing canine that had never grown in” (Oza). The daughter tries to deny any mention that her mother makes of her brother being back home because she doesn’t want to believe that he is truly home. The mothers desire and anguish manifest in front of her due to their intensity. Although the daughter in the novel has a totally different perspective on the world, she chooses to accept rather than challenge her mother’s perception of reality, which can be seen as a form of love.

However, when the mother tells her daughter that he is home she disagrees with the mother’s assertion that he is back home because “before they could walk, burbling mounds of fat and feathery hair dropped into communal swimming pools like coins, careless wishes tossed by believing parents” (Oza). The mother holds on to the belief that her son is still alive, despite the daughter’s denials. She is being plagued by the memories of her son because she continues to hold out hope that he is still alive. Her grief is so intense that it gives the impression that he actually walked through the door.

Similar to how “Fish Stories” addresses the subject of trauma, the short story “Playing Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain” shows how hallucinations and mortality relate in a manner similar to how Zoya utilizes video games to escape from reality. Additionally, it portrays the story of Watak, the father’s sibling who perishes under Soviet rule. To demonstrate how a video game may be alienating in the right manner, the narrator delivers the narrative in the second person. When “you close the door and start up MF Doom on your portable speaker,” (Kochai) the figurative language symbol is utilized. Because it embodies the narrator’s rejection of his own culture, this phrase serves as an example of the symbol. He tries to block off thoughts of his family so that he may focus only on the game. He attempts to adopt an American way of life, hiding his own ethnicity behind video games and marijuana. The narrator departs from his father in the backyard to play Metal Gear Rising, but while he does so he gets so disoriented in it that his family members begin to approach him one by one. The irony is shown when he ignores the hammering and remarks, “You shout that you are sick, yet the sound that comes out of your lips is not your own,” as his brother approaches to get him. He is not ill, but he would prefer some quiet time to play his game. He’s so preoccupied with his game that he continues to break his bond with his family.

Furthermore, Kochai takes a different approach to family connections in “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain,” isolating himself from both his family and the outside world. As he continues on playing the video game he begins to perceive the characters in the game as his father when, “for so long that you’ve become oddly immune to the self-loathing you felt when you were first massacring wave after wave of militant fighters who looked just like your father” (Kochai). As he plays the game, reality and the virtual world merge together, and he recognizes locations and family inside the game. When the narrator refers to his father as “a dark, sturdy man” (Kochai) it is clear that he wishes to avoid any type of interaction with his family. He further explains that he is “so unlike you that, as a child, you were sure that one day Hagrid would come to your door and inform you of your status as a Mudblood, and then your true life-the life without the weight of your father’s history, pain, guilt, hopelessness, judgment, and shame-would begin,” (Kochai) he says, making a reference to a literary method. Hagrid from Harry Potter is mentioned by the narrator because, much like in the book, Hagrid arrives to inform Harry that he is a wizard and that the Dudley’s have been lying to him about his parents. The narrator wants to live a life away from his family and free of Afghan culture. While playing the game, the narrator claims that his father never murdered anyone while he was a guerrilla warrior “but there is something in the act of slaughtering these Soviet N.P.C.s that makes you feel connected to him and his history of warfare.” It’s ironic that he wants to connect with his father in the video game but not in real life. The burden of guilt, shame of difference, challenging language obstacles, and other forms of alienation are common among refugee children who desire to heal ties with their parents. Because his father has gone through such immense loss and indescribable suffering, the narrator of this book, who has enjoyed a relatively protected existence, may be scared by his father’s experience in this story. The narrator then understands that he needs to experience pain with his father in some manner in order to relate to him.

The relationships within the family and death have always influenced the family member who is mourning the loss of a loved one. Familial ties are crucial because they foster, bolster, and repair ties that enable a family to maintain positive bonds with one another. Once the tie is severed by death, it affects how the surviving family members perceive reality and deal with their own emotions. In both stories, the cause of death has such an effect on the characters that their reality begins to shift and they begin to perceive the deceased. Each of the story’s narrators deals differently with the loss of a family member. The mother of the deceased son in “Fish Stories” begins to hallucinate when he appears to her while she is still grieving the loss of a loved one. “Playing Phantom Pain from Metal Gear Solid V”, Zoya is adamant about escaping reality, but he keeps playing the game that makes him think about his family and their homeland.

Written by Sonia Vandari

Works Cited

Oza, Janika. “Fish Stories: Journal.” The Kenyon Review, https://kenyonreview.org/journal/janfeb-2021/selections/janika-oza/.

KOCHAI, JAMIL JAN. “Playing Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.” New Yorker, vol. 95, no. 43, Jan. 2020, pp. 54–57. EBSCOhost,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=140908526&site=ehost-live.