The metaphor that unites the theme of war in Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden with its hyper-reflexive confusion is a sense of victory over the text. The successful reader has come to a satisfying closure, or, if you are a true hypertexan, have satisfactorily returned to the beginning of the labyrinth like a soldier returning from war. "What were the two things Schwarzkopf always asked them? -how's the chow soldier, you gettin' mail reglar, that's nice. Victory through information" ("Mail"). Information is supposed to defeat confusion. But the Garden's composite sketch of Gulf War media is a wash of meaningless information and sound bites. It jabs at the TV networks, the (ample) commentary on CNN's starring role in the Gulf War, and notes that "the world was plugging in" ("Otherworldly"). The numerous letters written to and from Emily Runbird, a character stationed in the Gulf, aren't any clearer. All forms of communication in Victory Garden, like the text itself, are both clear and unanimous and frustratingly obstructive of what is really going on.

While Victory Garden would have you chock its confusion up to "the fog of war," it is the reader's struggle with the text that creates a heap of contradictory drafts to sift through. Any reader knows that all paths are equally correct or incorrect, equally meaningful and nonsensical at the same time. The reader's self-reflexive experience of confusion is more important than any thread within the plot.