Living in London during WW2, Henry Yorke became a volunteer firefighter. Just as the war was ending, Yorke, under his pen name, Henry Green wrote about firefighter life under the Blitz, the 1940 aerial bombing by Germany. CAUGHT was fresh writing, published in 1943, or was it '45?OK, the fictionalized events depicted in CAUGHT are based on Yorke's actual experiences as a firefighter. But what about material in () which explicitly contradicts what has just been stated in a first person narrative? Stated by the writer of course, who now refutes what he has just put into the mouth of his literary invention.Why do this? Maybe an example will help to clarify.Here is a bit of a narrative volunteer firefighter Richard Roe offers Dy, his wife, rejoining her in the country, following his evacuation after a bomb fell close and caused Richard to suffer "nervous debility."In this sequence of two paragraphs, Richard speaks about how he and his crew of firefighters confronted a fire in a lumber yard on an island and then in the 2nd paragraph, our Henry Green flatly contradicts his Richard:"Well, when we got around those buildings I told you about, they were great open sheds really, for keeping the weather off the more expensive timber, we were right on top of the blaze. It was acres of timber storage alight about two hundred yards in front, out in the open, like a huge wood fire on a flat hearth, only a thousand times bigger.""(It had not been like that at all. What he had seen was a broken, torn-up dark mosaic aglow with rose where square after square of timber had been burned down to embers, while beyond the distant yellow flames toyed joyfully with the next black stacks which softly merged into the pink of that night.)"Is there a rule of literary interpretation, that explains when a writer contradicts the writer's own invented character?Calling your attention to a line spoken by Richard just before, we may find our way through the muddle:"One changes everything after by going over it."Having been a fireman during the Blitz, and then writing about firemen during the Blitz, Henry Green appears to be drawing a distinction between (1) his lived experience, and (2) a description of his lived experience.Both of the paragraphs quoted above are of the same lived experience, narrated after the fact - like all narratives. One is prosaic and the other is a well rendered literary elaboration. Compared to life, neither one are worth much. So say I Henry Green saith.By writing out two separate descriptions of the same event, Henry Green seems to be clicking his teeth at fiction writing; how ever so good, how ever so true-seeming to the reader, no subsequent narrative is the same as living the thing itself.Green's suspicions about the deceptive futility of narration - able to create a picture of life but not life itself - is why he emphasizes dialogue, in all of his fiction.With dialogue, the reader is drawn close in, able to overhear, in the moment of speech/action. In a 1958 interview Green gave pride of place to dialogue over description: "People strike sparks off of each other, that is what I try to note down. But mark well, they only do this when they are talking together."All this literature huff and puff and nothing about the plot? Nothing about the characters?Of the several unexpected twists and turns in CAUGHT the most shocking landed on me, in the reaction of the head of Richard's company of volunteer firefighters, the soon-to-be late Mr. Pye, asked by a psychiatrist to provide details about his dangerously ill sister, who had kidnapped little Christopher, Richard and Dy's son. (If you buy this book, it may harm your communion with Henry Green to read ahead to this bit; patience, patience, patience.)The upheaval of war, which roiled England twice in the 20th century, seems a smash-up for all the characters; their varying behavior appears as reactions differ, and as they misunderstand each other.Nobody asked for this war. No one asked for the opportunity to give up your 1938 routines and become a volunteer firefighter in 1939, trying to save your capital city from obliteration. No one asked if you were willing to say goodbye to your sweetheart, sent off in great likelihood never to return.Everybody is CAUGHT.