The Surrendered by Chang-rae Lee

steps of the Brennan family porch, the boy bearing most of his father’s weight, he would sometimes say his son’s name aloud, over and over, in a kind of monkish ecstasy:
Hector, my Hector.
And then, if consciousness still graced him after Hector let him fall upon the parlor room sofa, he would look up and ask if he wished to hear again why he’d named him so, to call him thus instead of, say, Achilles, a more glorious appellation?
    “Okay, Da, tell me.”
    “Because a man wants a son for a son, and has no use for a champion.”
    After reading the epic in school, Hector pointed out to him that his namesake was killed, his city doomed to ruin, his father eventually slaughtered as well.
    “No matter, boy,” his father told him. “They tell us stories not to live by but to change. Make our own. Look at you. You’ll live forever, anyone with eyes can see that. Just never go to war.”
    Jackie Brennan, of course, could never go to war; unlike Hector, he was a wisp of a man, and had a right foot turned permanently sideways at birth, his right hand unnaturally angled as well, while smallish and stunted besides, like that of a tiny, elderly woman. But he was cleverer than most, and had he been born to a family of greater means and aspiration he might have been a state’s attorney or college professor, as he was well spoken and quick and had firm notions (for better or worse) of what people should hear. When World War II broke out and legions of Ilion’s sons signed up, his was one of the few mutterings of skepticism, if not dissent, though at first Jackie mostly kept his feelings about the war to himself, or else lectured to his weary-eared wife and daughters, and to Hector, who in fact didn’t mind listening to him make his roundabout arguments in his bright, resonant baritone. He loved him, but unlike most other boys whose love for their fathers was predicated on fear and misplaced idolatry, his was as for a favorite uncle, if deeper, a love that recognized the man’s foibles and numerous failings and saw them as distinctive rather than sorry and pathetic.
    But there was a limit to that view, and it came at the pub; after Jackie Brennan got his belly wash of beer and whiskey he grew overly voluble, his voice taking on a higher, more insistent pitch. The war was ever weighing on his spirits. In the pub, he might warmly address a group of young men in uniform, after not paying them any attention all night: “Permit me to buy you fellas another round of drafts, that I might hold up my head and know I did my part!”
    The servicemen would raucously accept and make room for him while the regulars miserably eyed one another and Hector, wise to what would happen next. Hector would sit on the periphery until his father cajoled him to come in the circle when the mugs of beer went round, with Jackie serially playing prosperous gentleman, the boastful older brother, and, finally, the knowing comrade in arms. But he had other agendas.
    “It’s thirst-making work, defending our land. The noblest calling.”
    “You got that, mister!”
    It was at this point that Hector would tug on his father’s sleeve, though to no avail.
    “But what I wish, my good lads, is that we’d do just that, instead of getting involved in every minor dispute on the far side of the planet.”
    “You calling Pearl Harbor a minor dispute?” one of the servicemen replied. “Last I checked, it was a dirty ambush by those rat Japs, where a couple thousand of our guys got it.”
    “Rat Japs indeed!” Jackie Brennan would cry. “But what conditions were in fact at play behind that horrid carnage?” his father would intone pedantically. At this point his father was already in the bag, but an audience of newcomers always inspired him, recasting his view of himself as a hardworking factory man into that of thinker, of wise man, someone whose main purpose was to bear light and truth to others, like the revered teacher he’d pictured himself becoming when