The Things They Carried, A Rose for Emily, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Gonzo - Essay Example

?The Things They Carried In Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried”, each soldier carried with them items that not only had a physical purpose, but also a symbolic, psychological meaning. These objects, whether material or a memory, were vital to how the soldiers dealt with the savageness of the Vietnam War. Kiowa, for example, had a profound need to carry around his illustrated New Testament everywhere he went. O’Brien clarifies that Kiowa was not the least bit religious, but carried the Bible because his father gave it to him. Kiowa kept the Bible close out of remembrance of faith and tradition in his family. This Bible symbolizes the comforting, grounded past that Kiowa left behind when he was sent to Vietnam. Kiowa read the Bible when he could, but the primary reason he carried it was for its comforting smell. It brought back the memories that were otherwise out of reach for him, and made him return home in his imagination. Similarly, Dave Jensen carried soap and an array of other hygiene products for their material purposes and for emotional reasons. These products did very little good when Jensen was humping through Vietnam, with thick layers of dirt, grim, and sweat coating his skin to the point that attempting to stay clean was futile. Nonetheless, Jensen did the best he could. Furthermore, the emotional purposes of these objects was to remind him of better, more relaxing time, of his rest and relaxation in Sydney, where he took the soap, and of his home. The symbolism in these items was, like Kiowa, the life that Jensen had left behind, those days when he required the objects on a daily basis. Rat Kiley relied on comic books to see him through the horror of the Vietnam War. In their physical forms, these comic books allowed Riley to escape the war through his imagination, turning to the stories and pictures of another world to help him survive his own. Like the aforementioned objects, these comic books were from his childhood, and therefore vital to his present position as an adult in combat. As emotional symbolism, these comic books were that childhood that Riley longed to return as it was so far from the life he was living in Vietnam. He was able to escape the war while simultaneously revisiting his home, a place of comfort and familiarity. A Rose for Emily The past and tradition are important aspects in the short story “A Rose for Emily” because these are parts of life that Emily was incapable of giving up. Emily had a life that she became comfortable with, a life that others may have found to be out of the ordinary but that she appreciated for its familiarity. After her father died, she kept his body in the home for three days, denying to the townspeople that he actually died. It becomes apparent here that Emily’s need for the past and tradition is so ingrained in her that it has turned into a psychological illness. It almost comes as no surprise to learn that Homer Barron, Emily’s potential future husband, had not really gone missing during the course of the story, but had been found as little more than a skeleton locked up in a room, long dead in a bed that he had shared with Emily. So desperate to keep life as it always had been, Emily kept even the bodies of her loved ones around to keep the normalcy and familiarity alive. The images of the past that this story contains are those that surround Emily being loved. She was loved and doted upon by her father, but when he died, that love was taken from her. Many decades later, Emily fell in love with Homer Barron. The townspeople did not immediately know what had become of him, but it is later revealed that he also died, once again causing a source of Emily’s love to be taken from her. Unwilling to part with the love of her father, Emily kept his body around, but was forced to surrender it to the townspeople to be properly buried. Emily did not want the same fate to befall the love she was receiving from Homer, so before he could die, Emily poisoned him and preserved him as the love that she remembered. In this way, the past also haunts Emily’s present. She recalled the emptiness that she felt when her father had died. When she met Homer and love was restored to her life, and she was the center of a man’s attention, she was haunted by how her previous love had been taken from her. These thoughts and emotions plagued her until she realized that she could not deal with the same loss again. So, instead of waiting for death to come for Homer, pulling his love from her, Emily got there first, allowing herself to live almost immortally with the corpse of her lover. When she died, she did so under the guise that she was still loved by Homer. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas Duke and Dr. Gonzo spend the majority of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as far from sober reality as possible. Indeed, it seems as though more time was spent in their drug-induced realities than in the real world taking place around them. Given their constant use of drugs, I believe that Duke and Dr. Gonzo were simply escaping the real world. Even though they were in Vegas on business, they used drugs when they could. These occurrences of drug use were to common to be recreational drug use. Duke and Dr. Gonzo may not have had a problem with real life, seeing as they were fairly successful with what they did, but they clearly found something much better in their drug-addled minds. Either that, or they simply enjoyed tripping out, though I think that was the case only once and a while. The drugs and the altered states that they enabled deal with the American Dream in the sense that Duke and Dr. Gonzo redefined what the American Dream was and how it could be obtained - through drugs. The truth of reality and the goal of the American Dream could be reached through this heightened state. In the eyes of Duke and Dr. Gonzo, the mundane Dream had been reached by everyone. Now it was time to take it to new, unexperienced levels. Las Vegas plays into the American Dream as it is a place where people can go from rags to riches; their lives can change literally overnight. In this sense, Las Vegas could be considered the cornerstone or birthplace of the American Dream. Duke and Dr. Gonzo, who believed that the American Dream no longer existed, thought that if there was even a single place left for the Dream to exist, it would be in Las Vegas, viewed through their drug-hazed eyes. Gonzo In Gonzo, the gaps of who Hunter S. Thompson was, and how he was portrayed in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, were bridged. While the movie adaptation reveals a lot about who Thompson was as the unique and complex person that others came to know him as, albeit slightly revamped for the silver screen, there were significantly more facets to his personality and life that were explored in Gonzo. By understanding Fear, I am able to understand the decisions and frustrations that were made known about Thompson in Gonzo. In a sense, Gonzo is a commentary to the goings-on in Fear as the film explores the underlying reasons for Thompson’s decisions both in the past and later in his life. The parallels between Thompson in real life and his portrayal in the movie are most noticeable when the attempt to find the American Dream is discussed. In the film and in real life, it is made clear that Thompson is unhappy with this concept of the American Dream, perhaps because he never felt that he obtained it for himself. When we see what he went through in Fear in an attempt to find the last place where the American Dream was still alive, his choices to retreat to his farm and even to run for mayor of Aspen make more sense. He was trying to find his own dream until he simply gave up, then turned to drugs for a new perspective on what the Dream really was. Knowing the events in Gonzo has allowed my understanding of Thompson to become deeper. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Dr. Gonzo and Duke come off as just being drug happy. There are some underlying reasons for their drug addiction on display throughout the film, though they are not immediately apparent. However, the core reasons for Gonzo’s - or Thompson’s - addiction to drugs are brought to light during Gonzo, which suddenly gives brand new meaning to context of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Read More