"Keeper of the Flame"

“Keeper of the Flame”

By: Matthew Vollmer

"We Are the Same"
People are quick to judge one another, even when we don't know
the truth about each other. Everybody is connected in one way or
another, and we could either live in the mistakes of our relatives
or grow and learn from them.
(Photograph is from huffingtonpost.com)

Matthew Vollmer is the author of two short fiction collections titled Gateway to Paradise and Future Missionaries of America and his work has also been featured in 26 magazines, some including: Paris Review, Glimmer Train, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Antioch Review. Also according to his website, matthewvollmer.com, he has a B.A. and M.A. in English from North Carolina State University, and he is the recipient of the 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Grant and the recipient of the Sturm Award for Creative Arts at Virginia Tech. His essay “Keeper of the Flame” is featured in the 2013 edition of The Best American Essays, and it is about the father of the author taking him on a trip to visit one of his dental patients he calls the “Nazi”. Right away the author makes known that he doesn’t know what to expect and although he hasn’t met his father’s acquaintance yet, he already feels intimidated. The “Nazi” takes the author and his father on a tour of his home, which is filled with artifacts from the Third Reich, and one question is resting on the author’s tongue. “Are you a real Nazi?” is all the author wants to ask because he knows what this man is glorifying is morally wrong, but he is too daunted to speak up. At the end of the tour, the”Nazi” shows the author a list of Nazi soldiers and one of them had the same last name as the author. The author refuses to speak when this happens and he is upset because he was associated with and called a Nazi.

Matthew Vollmer’s purpose in writing this essay is to show the reader that although you feel strongly about your beliefs, your surroundings will always influence your actions and words no matter how faithful you are to your beliefs. The context of this essay is historical in a sense that it is impossible to change history, but you can learn from it and change yourself. This is what the “Nazi” was trying to teach the author and his father, and the author wrote this to target those who are stuck in the past and can’t think about the present. The long, descriptive paragraphs that are filled with commas and dashes help get the author’s point across. I think the author did accomplish his purpose by giving his own example of how intimidation can cluster your thoughts and your actions, even if you know that the person or object intimidating you is morally wrong. It’s as if someone held a gun to your head and asked if you still believed in your god; not very many people would answer truly to their beliefs, and Matthew Vollmer clearly expresses this with his encounter with the “Nazi”.