The things they Carried - Research Paper Example

Dr. Richard Courtney ENG-122 James Saunders Jr. June 3, The Narration of Reality as Fiction: The Negotiation of Memory and History in "The Things They Carried" The Things They Carried is Tim O'Brien's quasi-biography about his experience fighting in the Vietnam War. After working as a reporter at Washington Post, O'Brien chose to represent the trauma in war through fiction. In the short stories collection The Things They Carried, the documented history of the Vietnam War is narrated through a fictional memory of both the protagonist and O'Brien. By narrating and representing war trauma through personal memory and fiction, O'Brien is able to revisit and retell the war to achieve a potential redemption in reality. He also shows how soldiers are dehumanized during the Vietnam War and how they have become machines rather than actual human beings with a will of their own. As Tina Chen describes the narrative style in The Things They Carried, "O'Brien dismantles binaristic notions of 'happening-truth' and 'story-truth': 'A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than truth' (O'Brien89)" (77). In other words, documented history and the story-telling of the Vietnam War are not necessarily antagonistic. This is made possible because "the disorder of a world without rules underlies O'Brien problematizing of the boundaries between personal memory and official history" (Chen 79). As a result, the short stories he wrote juxtapose descriptions of soldiers as individual human beings with thoughts and emotions with scenes that vividly depict the dehumanizing violence at the war. O'Brien's purpose of writing war fictions is not to recount the Vietnam War as a documented truth, but to revise it to produce a social redefinition of war. The opening and title story, "The Things They Carried" exemplifies several literary features of how O'Brien attempts to narrate the almost incommunicable war trauma and morality through memory and fiction. This story uses dramatic action and a focal representation of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross, similar to most war fictions. However, "The Things They Carried" also challenges these two generic devices by representing the emotions of individual soldiers which they sometimes find inexplicable to others, including the men in their platoon. The story also invokes and questions morality in war, even though in some instances it asserts that there is no moral at war. As Marily Wesley observes, the plot of the story "imposed dramatic structure of violation and resolution, which makes violent death and chaotic response comprehensible is not adapted by the story, which is, instead, organized as lists of actual and emotional burdens toted by the soldiers" (5). Such lists make the story relatively unexciting among generic war fictions as violence is not present through combats but through emotional and physical burdens the soldiers carry. The lack of violence in the story also "deflects the ascription of moral purpose to the violent events of war" (Wesley 6). However, even though O'Brien asserts through Henry Dobbins's character that war gives no moral lessons, his story still raises the question on moral of war by bring the ethical uncertainty to the surface through fiction. This is exemplified in the scene where Mitchell Sanders discovers the corpse of a Vietnamese child soldier and decided to cut off his thumb and gave it to Norman Bowker as a gift. While Sanders said there was a moral in that scenario, Henry Dobbins wondered what the moral is and finally they both decide that there is no moral at all. Unlike traditional story-telling, O'Brien's story lacks a definite moral at the end, thus forcing the reader to rethink what war entails and what it means to people who have experienced the trauma. Another effect of narrating the trauma through fiction is that it allows O'Brien to recreate the experience of war without dehumanizing the people involved. Representing the Vietnam War as a documented history entails describing individual soldiers as merely a number of either casualties or survivors. An event of such a large scale may alienate readers who have not experienced it firsthand as it is difficult to comprehend the vastness of its influence on individual human lives. By recounting the trauma of war through fiction and memory, O'Brien is able to bring the event to a personal level, thus allowing the reader to understand and maybe identify with people who were once engaged in the war. As Alex Vernon suggests, "the sense of community involved in trauma literature as a condition of healing and the communitas sought by pilgrims as a fundamental condition of spiritual development come together in O'Brien the author's and Tim the narrator-character's narrative quests for spiritual healing" (8). Indeed, by expressing the incommunicable war trauma through O'Brien's personal memory and fiction, O'Brien is attempting to achieve a moral redemption through story-telling. Such a representation which combines both facts and imagination also allows O'Brien and others who have experienced the Vietnam War to recuperate through revising their traumatic experience. Through The Things They Carried, O'Brien demonstrates "the power of story-telling to transform events and to affirm a new kind of truth, one more spiritual than factual, while somehow in the process redeeming us and resurrecting the dead" (Vernon 2). O'Brien's treatment of war through fiction serves an ethical function as an "acknowledgement of the reality one cannot not know" (West 218). Wesley further explains the morality of O'Brien's postmodern narrative of the Vietnam war by arguing that "within the narrative structure of war that power is deflected to the service of ideological limitation, but its deployment as a literature of violence treated through the oblique filter of postmodern practice may generate ethical definition" (15). As O'Brien juxtaposes culture, suffering, violence, death, and the body, the reader is invited to put these pieces together by revising the history of the Vietnam War, and thus contributes to a new ethical definition of what wars really entail. One example such a social redefinition is that of exile and displacement. In the story "The Things They Carried," the body and the prospect of returning home are represented by metonymy. As Chen observes, "the necessity of redesignating home as a generative location collides with figurations of the metonymic relationship between body and place" (84). This is characterized by Jimmy Cross's constant imagination of Martha while recognizing the futility of his unrequited love. In a sense, the thought of Martha substitutes Cross's idea of returning home during his exile in Vietnam. In other words, Martha or to be precise, the image and imagination of Martha, is the metonym of home. On the other hand, the detailed description of the Cross's good-luck charm-a pebble bestowed by Martha-suggests that the artifact is a metonym for Martha for Cross to realize his romantic fantasy by "carry[ing] the pebble in his mouth, turning it with his tongue, tasting sea salts and moisture" (9). However, neither the metonyms of home or of a romantic relationship is generative as Cross's imagination always ends up with the same ending. Cross's concept of the metonym is at last challenged when Ted Lavender dies in an operation while Cross is too focused on his fantasy of Martha. At that moment, the metonyms in his exilic consciousness about returning to America are unable to cope with the violent operations he is dealing with in Vietnam. Therefore, he decides to burn away Martha's photos and discard the pebble. The clash between the personal and the political is a motif in "Things They Carried." O'Brien describes not only the weapons and ammunition the soldiers carry, but also their emotional burdens and sentimental objects, such as the good-luck charms. However, regardless of how much weight they are carrying, all they do is humping endlessly until they cease to remember what their mission is. O'Brien vividly describes the dehumanization of these soldiers: They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward, against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. (13) In this paragraph, O'Brien uses many commas to the simple phrases which portray the soldiers' motions, rendering their movements merely mechanical. The language is plain but powerful as it represents the dullness and the lack of human thoughts and emotions during the war. The state of mind of the soldiers is not obscured by any flowery language so as to render vividly their dehumanization. In addition, in this paragraph all the individual soldiers collapse into one pronoun: "they." In other words, these people are defaced because their actions involve no personal emotions or will. This highlights the effects of war on soldiers, and how soldiers, who used to be humans with feelings, are transformed into automatons because of the constant violence and fear induced by the war. Such dehumanization is juxtaposed with the description of the body, reminding the reader of the presence of human flesh in the war. For example, the description of Ted's death focuses mainly on his weight: He was dead weight. There was no twitching or flopping. Kiowa, who saw it happen, said it was like watching a rock fall, or a big sandbag or something-just boom, then down-not like the movies where the dead guy rolls around and does fancy spins and goes ass over teakettle-not like that, Kiowa said, the poor bastard just flat-fuck-fell. (8) Here, O'Brien is explicitly mocking the war fiction genre which exemplifies the painful death of a human body. The above paragraph mirrors the reality of war as Ted, like many other American soldiers, dies an inglorious death with very few actions. O'Brien's description of death is also slightly comic as he compares a dead body with inanimate objects, together with sound effects uttered by Kiowa, a likable character. There is no exaggerated violence or blood in O'Brien's description; however, the depiction of Ted's death remains very visceral. O'Brien's way to narrate a soldier's death is plain which highlights how soldiers during the Vietnam War witness people dying so much that they become non-reactive. In conclusion, Tim O'Brien is fictional representation of the Vietnam War juxtaposes memory with history to serve the ethical function of redefining the experience of war and recuperating from the war trauma. In addition, although O'Brien's short stories adopt some of the conventional literary devices in the war fiction genre, he at the same time mocks such traditions in narrating and representing a war. As a former soldier fighting in Vietnam, O'Brien is able to comprehend the dehumanizing effect of war, and even though some of the traumas are incommunicable to others, O'Brien has managed to express the circumstances American soldiers were exposed to during the Vietnam War. His use of fiction to represent such a traumatic historical event is effective in arousing a human empathy and sympathy to resurrect the dead as individual people instead of a mere number of casualties. The weaknesses and fears of the soldiers depicted in Tim O'Brien's story humanize them and make them appear as actual human beings rather than killing machines that have no will of their own. Works Cited Chen, Tina. "Unravelling the Deeper Meaning": Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Contemporary Literature 39.1 (1998): 77-98. Print. O'Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print. Wesley, Marilyn. "Truth and Fiction in Tim O'Brien's If I Die in a Combat Zone and The Things They Carried." College Literature 29.2 (2002): 1-18. Print. West, Cornell. "An Interview with Cornell West." Modernism/Postmodernism Peter Brooker ed. New York: Longman:1992. 203-220. Print. Vernon, Alex. "Salvation, Storytelling, and Pilgrimage in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried." Mosaic 36.4 (2003): 171-189. Print. Read More