After finishing The Forbidden Zone, I took some time to reflect on my experience as a reader. There is some chronological structure given to the fragmented pieces of the novel as we know Borden started in Belgium in the first half of the collection and was in the Somme for the second half. However, these stories could all be read and understood independently so does order even really matter? There are certain stories which really delivered unique emotional impacts through content, language, or style. For instance, no matter where “Rosa” is located in the text, it is a memorable fragment of the collection. However, there are also a few stories I believe especially impacted me because of where in the collection I read them. “The Two Gunners,” for instance, stands out to me as a story I cannot stop thinking about, and I cannot help but wonder whether it stands out to me because it is the last story I read or if it is the last story because of particular emotional impact or the unique figures depicted. If “The Two Gunners” was in the middle, would I remember it the way I do? If “Enfant de Malheur,”(a beautiful story, but one I had to reread to really remember because it was in between “The Beach” and “Rosa” ) was at the end of the collection, would I instead be haunted by “‘He is safe'”(61) instead of “‘A1 at Llyod’s Madam”(112)? I will never know. In my postmodern women writers class last year, we all read a book with two stories but half the copies had one first and the other half had a reverse order and we discussed how we will never truly experience reading the opposite one first. I think a similar thing can be applied here. To me, the order I read the stories in mattered. Maybe for other people it didn’t make a difference, I just think it is an interseting way to look at the collection.