Tim O'Brien Book Northern ights - Literature review Example

Your Your Character Development in Northern Lights Tim O’Brien has written several well-received novelsin his career, and yet it had never occurred to him to embark on a writing career until he went to serve in the Vietnam War. In an interview with Daniel Bourne and Debra Shostak, O’Brien revealed that fighting in Vietnam generated a “revolution of personality; [he]’d been an academic and intellectual sort of person, and Vietnam changed all that.” One of the incidents that galvanized the writer inside O’Brien occurred when a friend of his stepped on a land mine and was instantly killed. As O’Brien related it, “[t]he horror brought [him] to put some words down on paper, and having written those words, new words came to me, and having written new words other words, until [he] had a six or seven page piece that went beyond this one man’s death and the death of those around him to death in general” (Bourne and Shostak). The ultimate result, O’Brien’s own self-examination about his own terrors, pushed O’Brien into writing. While Vietnam is a common setting in O’Brien’s novels, he does not see that his novels are, essentially about Vietnam: he says that he has “used [Vietnam] in the way Conrad writes about the sea, life on the water…[b]ut Conrad is no more writing about the sea than [O’Brien is] writing about war” (Bourne and Shostak). According to O’Brien, both authors use their settings to “get at the human heart and the pressure exerted on it” (Bourne and Shostak). And so for O’Brien, Vietnam is just one possible example of situations where the human will is tested by events. He writes about Vietnam as a situation where “you go over there with all of these naïve ideas, believing in country and your president and your fellow man,” and return home feeling “utterly abandoned by everything [you]’d believed in” (Rosica). However, O’Brien feels that he has moved on from Vietnam to finding his “general terrain as a writer, that sense of loss, where you find yourself slipping down the old rabbit hole of life, tumbling head over heels” (Rosica). To call O’Brien a Vietnam writer is, from his view, “like calling Toni Morrison a black writer or Joseph Conrad an ocean writer or Shakespeare a royalty writer.” He claims to “write about the human heart” (Edelman). This may be one reason that O’Brien has also taken on the Midwest in a great deal of his writing. Since his return from Vietnam, he has taken a significant dislike for many of the values he associates with Middle America. He uses the Midwest as a backdrop to express his “sense of bitterness about small-town Republican, polyester, white-belted, Kiwanis America.” He has a definitely hostility toward “people who vote and participate in civic events, who build playgrounds and prop up our libraries and then turn around and send us to wars, oftentimes out of utter and absolute ignorance” (Bourne and Shostak). In fact, he blames that part of America for sending him to Vietnam, and he sees that part of America as having bought into President Bush’s arguments about dethroning Saddam Hussein and devastating Iraq. Northern Lights looks at the Vietnam struggle from the perspective of two brothers, Paul and Harvey. Harvey goes to fight in the Vietnam War, but Paul refuses to go, deciding instead to protest against the conflict. They grow up in northern Minnesota, which serves as the backdrop of much of the novel, in which the two brothers fight against an unexpected blizzard in the woods. While the Vietnam question is an important part of the novel, it is not the central focus. Instead, the book focuses on conflicts that stand well outside the confines of any particular era: the struggle of humanity against nature, and humanity against human nature itself. The idea of brother struggling against brother goes back as far as the Old Testament accounts of the first murder, and so this novel touches on a lot of timeless ideas. O’Brien describes Harvey and Paul as “twin oxen struggling in different directions against the same old yoke, [and yet] they could not talk.” This quote serves as an effective microcosm of the brothers’ relationship. Their brotherhood makes them like enough for them both to be called the same animal, and the yoke is their unspoken disagreement, which, as with many brothers, has its seeds in a time that they cannot remember, but has as its possibly most virulent expression the disagreement over the Vietnam War. While Harvey was eager to go and fight for what his country told him was a noble cause, Paul never bought into the idea that the Vietnam War was necessary. The yoke also includes the guilt that comes from the perception that, as brothers, they should have a close relationship, and yet they do not. This guilt is both a spur to action and a source of paralysis, ironically – both feel that they should communicate, in some way, and yet the guilt also keeps them from communicating as well as they might. The Peri/Perry family has had a tradition of terse communication. The last two generations of Perrys, in fact, has been motherless, and so fathers have had to teach their sons the lessons of both parents. As one might expect, the lessons that come from one’s mother, such as empathy, sympathy, understanding, and the need to express one’s feelings from time to time, have been lost over the past few generations. And so when such a complex conflict as the one between Paul and Harvey arises, neither brother has the necessary emotional ability to communicate effectively with the other, which leads to crisis moments on several levels in the story. This gap in communication comes to bear on both Paul and Harvey’s relationships. Paul and Grace have a marriage that is healthy in some ways. The things that Grace enjoyed about Paul as a war protester come to chafe on the relationship somewhat as the war issue comes into the Perry family. As the idea of a family starts to enter their minds, Paul’s role as dissident starts to clash with the idea of provider. Paul refers to himself as “priceless,” but always with a sarcastic tinge to his voice. Whereas dissidents can do much in the way of speeches and protests and rallies, when it comes time to raise a family, those same gifts are not always as useful. Ironically, although Harvey is more traditional than Paul in his idea of the proper way in which American men should serve their country, he is less conventional in his relationship with Addie. When she refers to him as a “pirate,” she is talking about the way in which he can come into a situation, take charge of it, then wash his way out of it, having taken what he came for in such a way that his return is eagerly awaited, although with a bittersweet tinge of regret. When she says that pirates cannot get married, she means that people like Harvey cannot give to a relationship, beyond what they need to give to get their own selfish benefit from it. She also believes that she, Grace, and Harvey, are all “vying” for Paul in their own way. Addie is vying for Paul in the most dangerous way, by telling him that she loves him, and wanting him to leave Grace for her. Grace vies for her husband to be what she wants him to be, which gives Addie an opportunity to slip into the relationship and say that she loves Paul just as she is. Harvey is vying for Paul in the sense that he too feels the pain of their shared brotherhood being rent asunder, and wants to have a healthy relationship with him. The epigraph from Revelation that begins the novel is a telling device. For one, apocalyptic prophecy will recur throughout the story, giving the underlying mood that some sort of drastic end awaits human society. Another factor in the repeated use of apocalyptic prophecy has to do with one of Tim O’Brien’s underlying concerns in his writing. For him, “one of the objects among many in writing about violence has to do with reaffirming the truth of the clichés that ‘war is hell,’ or ‘death is horrible,’ something [people] all so often tend to forget. Body counts, casualty rates, our politicians have made it all so abstract” (Bourne and Shostak). This casual ignorance of the violence that war begets, then, serves as a gradual weakening of the tectonic plates that support society. As those at the top of society, or at least most distant from its violence, turn a deaf ear to the struggles that go on around them, and that their politicians often countenance and even initiate for nefarious reasons, the civility, and even the survival, of our society encounters grave risk. And so when we read Northern Lights, we read about wars, battles, and struggles that are common to us all. Humanity has shown a depressing ability to persist with those struggles and yet survive. Northern Lights represents one author’s desire to live a different way – a more peaceful, honest and open way. Works Cited Bourne, Daniel, and Shostak, Debra. Interview with Tim O’Brien. Accessed 20 April 2007 online at http://www.wooster.edu/artfuldodge/interviews/obrien.htm Edelman, David Louis. Interview with Tim O’Brien. Accessed 20 April 2007 online at http://www.davidlouisedelman.com/interviews/obrien.cfm Rosica, Karen. Interview with Tim O’Brien – From Life to Fiction. Accessed 20 April 2007 online at http://www.lighthousewriters.com/newslett/timobrie.htm Read More