Overall- final blog

The things they carried was a very good read for me. I mean I was able to read it in two days. The stories were interesting, full of depth, and O' Brien was really able to get me to feel some version of what he felt in his stories. When comparing The Sun Also Rises to The Things They Carried, the Things They Carried was far superior. It had so much more that the reader could take from it and put into their everyday life. In The Sun Also Rises, there seemed to be no point or plot or moral that I could take from it and it was just not an enjoyable read. Tim O' Brien did an excellent job keeping me engaged in the novel and I just really liked the setup of the little short stories. I have not read a fiction book that was set up that way and it really made it enjoyable to read.

Inception

About a week ago, I watched Inception for the first time. Now I have already seen it twice because i like . But in the last chapter "The Lives of the Dead", I thought it was interesting how he would dream just so he could be with the girl he loved. In the movie, the main character also dreams to spend time with his deceased wife. "My dream had become a secret meeting place, and in the weeks after she died I couldn't wait to fall asleep at night." Whether or not this is the exact version of what happened to O' Brien or the exaggerated truth, the reader can easily tell that he loved her immensely. However, I think doing something like that could have some negative effects. After her death, just remembering her all the time is going to make it hard for him to move on. After someone's death, the best thing to do is to try and move on the best he or she can. Even though I say this, however, I think that the dreams were a good thing for O' Brien because he still has them and he was able to move on.

Afraid of the Dark

Little kids are always somewhat scared of the dark. I remember when I was 5 or 6 years old, I would have to move a coat hanger I had in my room to the hallway becuase I thought its shadows looked scary. However, the common idea is that as you age and become an adult, the dark is no longer a problem. Adults do not get scared in the dark. O' Brien finds this statement to be false and I find it very interesting. "Because the darkness squeezes you inside yourself, you get cut off from the outside world, the imagination takes over." If a soldier is alone in Vietnam in the dark keeping watch, he's not going to be able to see very much. Because of this, his mind, or imagination, is going to start making the soldier think some weird things becuase there is nothing else to imagine. I just thought I'd comment on this part of the story becuase when your in a jungle, by yourself, in the pitch dark, you become a kid again.

Just as dangerous

On page 183, O' Brien uses an analogy that shows how some places in Vietnam are as dangerous as a sporting event in the United States. "You could still die of course-- once a month we'd get hit with mortar fire-- but you could also die in the bleachers at Met Stadium in Menneapolis, bases loaded, harmon Killebrew coming to the plate." This analogy is humorous and shows how not everywhere in Vietnam was too dangerous. The way the author uses it is effective becuase it very well gets his point across that even though they would get fired upon every once in a while, its not too important to worry much about defense. Describing how someone could just as easily die at a Mets game is enough to show this. While this is a good analogy, I have noticed, however, that the author does not use many analogies in his stories. His stories are much more straightfoward. Because of this, what the reader really has to think about is how true the stories O' Brien tells really are.

Give him a break

In the chapter "The Ghost Soldiers", O' Brien describes how he was shot twice, and on the second time, the medic who was on the field with them was brand new to combat. Because of this, he was very scared and when O' Brien was shot and going through shock, it took him ten minutes just to go and revive him. O' Brien almost died and had to be taken off the field of combat becuase of this. "So when I got shot the second time, in the butt, along the Song Tra Bong, it took the son of a bitch almost ten minutes to work up the nerve to crawl over to me...I'd almost died of shock." When this happened, he had some harsh feelings towards the medic who was called Bobby Jorgenson. I think that O' Brien should have given him a break. O' Brien described how he wanted to hurt Jorgenson for what he had done to him. But I'm sure that when O' Brien had his first combat fight, he had frozen up just as Jorgenson had done. And O' Brien wasn't the one who had to go risk his life to go save the lives of the wounded. That courage comes with experience and Jorgenson just didn't have that experience yet.

Both Kinds

The 3 chapters from "Speaking of Courage" to "In the Field" all include some type of both internal and external conflict. The external conflict is that the soldiers ended up in the shit field and began taking mortar fire from everywhere and this is what caused the death of Kiowa. The internal conflict is what happened mainly after the war was over when Norman Bowker got home. He had to deal with what had happenned that night on the shit field and how he had to let Kiowa go and sink into the so-called land. Years after the war he had to deal with all of this internally. O' Brien is able to incorporate both of these very well into these chapters. I'm not sure if this is what he intended to happen, but to me, it represents all the soldiers had to go through before, and even after the war. For them, there was no escape.

Why Can't He tell?

After reading the chapter "Speaking of Courage" and a few of the chapters following that, I am still a little confused on why Norman Bowker just couldn't tell anyone about what happened that night on the shit field in Vietnam. He goes throughout the whole chapter imagining what his dad would say to his story or how a girl would react to his story. The dialogue would go like this: " 'Well anyway,' the old man would've said, 'there's still the seven medals.' " But why can't he tell them? He as that story bottled up inside of him for so long, and it probably is something that contributed to his suicide. If there is a deeper meaning in this story about Bowker than I don't understand it. I know he gives a reason to why he doesn't tell the different people. There has to be someone, however, that he would be able to tell.

Bits and pieces

O' Brien did not write this book as just one continual story that followed a specific timeline. It's written in many miny stories as I have mentioned in previous blogs. Becuase of this, O' Brien tends to reiterate parts of stories he had already talked about. But also what he will do is foreshadow events that he will eventually come to. For example, on page 37, he says, "A slim, dead, dainty young man of about twenty. Kiowa saying, 'No choice, Tim. What else could oyu do?' Kiowa saying, 'Right?' Kiowa saying, 'Talk to me.' " This gives the impression that maybe Tim killed a man but I was never too sure. Then this was affirmed in the chapter "The Man I Killed." In this chapter he goes into detail about how he killed the man and how he felt about it after. I like how O' Brien foreshadowed because it goes along with what he was explaning at the time and it also keeps you wanting to know what was really going on when Kiowa was talking to him.

Still civilized

I really like the chapter 'Church". When men go to war, many visualize them becoming savages and just becoming killing machines. In some cases this may be true. However, I like how this chapter represents how then men do not become like this. While the men are camped in a church with two monks, they treat the monks as human beings and not as just animals who live in Vietnam. " 'You're right,' he said. 'All you can do is be nice. Treat them decent, you know?' " While being in Vietnam for such a long time, they still know how to be civilized human beings and not just animals.

Very dynamic

After reading the chapter "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong", I came across reading about a character who is about as dynamic as it gets. Her name is Mary Anne and she is a girlfriend of a soldier who works at a emergency care place for the wounded. He smuggled her to Vietnam so they could be together, and ther changes that she goes through are enormous. When she arrives, she is an innocent, curious girl who has lived in a civilized society all her life. However, by the end of the chapter, she turns into a girl that is described as this: "At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues." To me, this is enough to show how dynamic of a character she is. I think the way the author uses this, however, is very effective. He is able to display how easily Vietnam can change a person from being civilized to almost an animal. In just 3 weeks, that is what she became.

The bad guy?

So far I've gotten to page 100 of the novel and I haven't been able to clearly identify the antagonist of the story. Some would be quick to point out at that the antagonist of the story would be the country of Vietnam itself. However, I do not find this to be true. While Vietnam and its army were what the American soldiers were fighting and the place itself is what caused the misery and death of several, I find the position of the antogonist to lie in another. I think that its the men themselves. Some of the men drive themselves crazy even when there is no danger in what they think is dangerous. For example, in the chapter "Enemies", the man who beats the other soldier's nose in starts to get paraniod about the guy when he comes back thinking that he is going to want revenge. His imagination and mind is what starts to drive him crazy until he finally breaks. At the end of the chapter, we find out that the other guy did not want to seek revenge in the first place. So one of the main things that the soldiers had to worry about was simply themselves.

The land is alive

Kind of backtracking a little bit, I remember O' Brien telling a story about how when I group of men went into the jungle of Vietnam and sat disguised in one spot for while. After some time, they started hearing some crazy things that sounded like a banquet in the middle of the forest. To me, this seemed like an anthropomorphism because there seem to be human-like characteristics to the land of Vietnam. This is very effective when used by the author because when he starts talking about how the land is alive, the reader begins to think how this is one of those not so true war stories, but with that deeper meaning. The story becomes to be a little far fetched and that becomes to be true when the guy telling the story goes to O'Briend and tells him how he had to make a few things up. What the guy says is on page 71: "They just lie there and groove, but after a while they start hearing...they hear chamber music...not human voices, though. Vecause it's the mountains. Follow me? The rock--it's talking."

Matters only to yourself

On pages 82-84 in the chapter "The Dentist", Curt Lemon is a soldier who when the dentist comes to check the teeth of the soldiers. However, he explains his fear of dentists and how he's always been so scared of them. Becuase of this, when he goes in to get his teeth checked, he faints right before the dentist even touches him. Because he was a guy and all guys do this, he got extremely embarrassed and he just kept to himself. However, I doubt anyone else in the group even cared at all that he fainted. Lemon also probably didn't care what the others thought of him, he was just embarrassed for himself, ashamed of himself. So when he went that night to get a perfectly good tooth removed, he didn't go brag to the others of what he had done. He did it and was then happy about it so he would no longer be ashamed of himself. This is what O' Brien recognized as true courage I think. As in the moral of "On a Rainy River", to be courageous is to do what you believe you should do, not what others try to make you do through embarrassment, no matter what they think you should do.

Parable

O'Brien makes out this book to be a bunch of parables, or short stories, in one. For the most part, every chapter is its own seperate story that somehow connects to the central character O' Brien. However, do these short stories have a moral? On page 74, O' Brien talks about the moral and goes on to say: "In a true war story, if ther's a moral at all, it's like the thread that makes the cloth. You can't tease it out. You can't extract the meaning without unraveling the deeper menaing. And in the end, really, ther's nothing much to say about a true war story , except maybe 'Oh.'." So is O' Brien saying that theres no way of finding out the moral of the story if there is one? This passage confused me becuase I'm not sure if he's saying whether or not a true war story has a moral. In the chapter "On a Rainy River", to me the moral of the story was that being a coward is doing what other people influence you to do and not want you want to do. But maybe O'Brien is saying there is a deeper meaning that that, I'm not sure.

What's its purpose?

After reading the chapters "Enemies" and "Friends", I'm not really sure what their purpose in this book was. Maybe I do not know the ultimate reason for O' Brien writing this book yet, but they just seemed a little random. A guess that I have is that it really shows how the Vietnam war just made people a little cookoo and that just made them do crazy things. For example, when Strunk broke his own nose so that him and Jensen were even, (even when to Jensen they pretty much were) that just seemed a little on the crazy side. The war makes the people paranoid about everything. When you get paranoid about someone in your own troop, however, I'm sure that's just going to make that person a little insane. So maybe O' Brien put these 2 chapters in there to show how psychologically straining the war could be. But I am still uncertain.

Coward?

In the chapter "On the Rainy River", I thought it was very interesting how O' Brien found himself to be a coward. But while reading the chapter, he finds himslef to be a coward for another reason than expected. In this chapter he runs away and drives north toward Canada becuase he has been drafted for the war. However, while staying at these cabins on a river bordering Canada, he realizes that he can't go to Canada so he decides to go back home and go to the war. O' Brien does not label himself a coward for trying to escape. Instead, he labels himself a coward because he can't get himself to jump off the boat and swim to Canada. For him, going back home and going to Vietnam was the cowardly thing to do. At first this seems a little odd, but I can see the reasoning that O' Brien put behind this. Simply being embarrassed of not going to the war because of what people thought of him is what made him a coward. Being courageous would have meant him doing what HE thought was right.

Checkers

In chapter 3 "Spin", I like the little side story about how 2 soldiers would play checkers every evening when it turned dark. The author explains on page 31, "There was something restful about it, something orderely and reassuring...the pieces were out on the board, the enemy wass visible, you could watch the tactics unfolding into larger strategies. There was a winner and a loser. There were rules." I really like this passage becuase it is a great metaphor for how the Vietnam war is not. The war that they were fighting was pretty much an all out guerrila war through a thick jungle and the Americans were far outnumbered, and their more advanced weapons did not help them much. The game of checkers was completely the opposite where there was an organized manner to things. Another thing that stuck out was the phrase: there was a winner and a loser. In the war, neither of the sides seemed to be winning the war and thats what probably what drove a lot of the soldiers crazy.

Back and Forth

The Plot of the Things They Carried does not follow a timelined sequence of events. The author, instead jumps around from the time during the war to the time after the war, to the time before the war. In terms of time, there is no order of things. However, what I do beleive the author follows is a progression of what he wants to get across in this novel. He has an organized progression of ideas that are unparallel to a timed sequence of events. For example, the book begins by describing what the soldiers carried during the war. The next chapter, however, goes on to describe the meeting of two characters after the war and two chapter after that, the author talks about himself when he got drafted during the war. So while the the plot does have a series of related events, the author finds it unecessary to follow a specific timeling in order to get his point across.

Even More Personal

Similarily to The Sun Also Rises, Tim O' Brien uses first person point of view. However, the way he uses it is a whole world different than the way Ernest Hemingway uses it. In the Things they carried, O' Brien is the acutal character taking place in the story. His name is used when others refer to him and this makes the story feel even more personal. Since O 'Brien was actually in the war and witnessed these things himself, it gives the reader a sense of ethos. The reader knows, as I did, that O' Brien means everything he says with all sincerity. However, why would this book be in fiction? While it has the qualites of a fiction book, it also has the qualities of a documentary. So is it true that the central character is in face O' Brien?

The things they carried.

I am now beginning my second book the things they carried. As I read into it, I am realizing that the setup of this book is extremely different than that of The Sun Also Rises. The first chapter begins with the author describing the soldiers and he especially likes to describe the items that they carried and the weight. I'm not really sure what what purpose this has. However, its purpose could be to truly show the reader the burdens of the men in Vietnam. Also, I was curious when I came across the part when the author described humping. He described it was walking or marching and also to hump something was to carry it. Is that really how the word is used or is it used as humor?