Fleeting Life in Literature - Essay Example

Life is Fleeting Literature often provides us with a means of understanding elements of life that are frequently misunderstood or not considered in a ‘normal’ experience. One of these elements is the way in which human beings frequently cope with extreme long-term stress such as those who are trapped in the bonds of poverty or enmeshed in the violence of war. Whether developed through poetry or short stories, characters appearing in texts such as Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out” or Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” illustrate better than psychological reports the dehumanizing effect of desperate situations in the face of death. Robert Frost’s poem “Out, Out” is a poem that presents the type of picturesque landscape for which he is known as well as a darker element of life through the character of his narrator. The poem is basically a very short story about a young boy who gets his hand sawed off while cutting wood and eventually dies as a result of the shock. In the meantime, the family is seen to turn back to their work as soon as it is verified that the boy is dead. As a result of the brevity with which Frost brings the poem to a close, “Out, Out” has often been criticized for the callousness with which the family is portrayed. “The poem almost satirizes society’s indifference at a child’s death. … The audible pause [of the caesura in line 32: “Little – less – nothing! and that ended it”] offers finality to the boy’s passing and after the tragedy the boy’s relations continue with their lives as normal, as if nothing had happened” (Lacy, 2008). While Frost, as first person detached observer of the events taking place, is able to appreciate the beauty of the sights and smells of the mountain home, the family itself is struggling to survive. This is illustrated in the sympathetic details provided by the narrator’s voice. At the opening of the poem, the speaker is observing the scene and appreciating the beauty of the world around him while also finding it impossible to completely ignore the darker elements. He talks about the “five mountain ranges one behind the other / Under the sunset far into Vermont” (5-6) and the comforting smell of the sawdust when he describes the “sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it” (3). The recurring sounds of the saw, though, highlight the fact that the only person in the scene who is enjoying this is the narrator as everyone else is busily working. “Life was hard for many American farm workers in the early twentieth century, as families struggled to make enough money to cope financially. Certainly everybody in this poem is hard at work, including the children: the young boy … ‘Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart’ (24)” (Gregory, 2007). While the narrator begs that the boy be given this last half hour of fading daylight for himself, he does so silently in understanding that the family cannot afford to lose the productive time. The language selected by the narrator also suggests that there is more emotion in the loss of the boy than the family’s actions might otherwise suggest. This begins not with the family’s reaction, but the reaction of the boy himself when the saw bites into his hand. “Then the boy saw all / Since he was old enough to know” (22-23). Realizing the severe damage to the hand and the probability that it would be useless in helping his family in their subsistence existence, the boy is not concerned as much for himself as he is of the loss of work this accident will represent for his family. “The boy seems to realize that even if he recovers from this accident he will be unable to take his place alongside his family as a worker on the farm, and will therefore become a liability” (Gregory, 2007). Although the loss of a half hour or even the few moments necessary to enjoy a beautiful view were unthinkable to the family, the doctor is sent for, meaning someone had to drop work to travel to get him while someone else, “the watcher at his pulse” (30), remained beside the boy as the doctor administered aid. The idea that the rest of the family is probably gathered about the boy wherever he lay is implied by the statement that “no one believed. They listened at his heart” (31). The plural reference and emergency situation would naturally draw the entire family in to see if there was anything they could do to help this small brother out, but the boy is dead. It is in the death of the boy, which takes place in the final three lines of the poem, that many people criticize Frost for the callous attitude of the family as they walk away seemingly without a tear as the narrator describes the death: “little – less – nothing! and that ended it. / No more to build on there. And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs” (32-34). These people could not afford the momentary glance upward to appreciate the beautiful sunset over rolling scenery; they couldn’t afford the time to mourn either. “In practical terms the family are now one worker down, meaning that the remaining members will have to work harder if they are to survive: they simply do not have the luxury of time to mourn the lost child” (Gregory, 2007). This is not to say they do not mourn, though. More than simply missing a useful tool and helpful contributing member of the family, the gathering about the boy’s sick bed throughout the crisis suggests a love and concern that is, ultimately, insufficient to keep him alive. It is even possible that the boy, realizing he will now be a liability to the family, out of love for them chooses to die rather than live as it is not specified whether he died from loss of blood, shock or something else. The family will need to mourn as they work or die themselves a much slower death. In a similar way, the various characters of Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” can be seen to have lost much of their humanity in their constant fixation on incidental objects that are not necessarily a part of the ‘kit’, itemized and weighed, that each one is obliged to carry with him on his missions. “O’Brien’s war stories … reflect the difficult choices forced upon those who have confronted the contradictions of combat” (Chen, 1998: 79). The boys in the story were once young men dreaming of adventure and perhaps even glory as they risked their lives to save those of their fellow soldiers. Most of them come from a relatively low background and perhaps saw service in the military as their means of escaping the perceived horrors of their own lives, passing them by in obscurity and mediocrity. Like the family in Frost’s poem, these boys are reduced to calculating the various weights and needs of their missions. “In mid-April, it was their mission to search out and destroy the elaborate tunnel complexes in the Than Khe area south of Chu Lai. To blow the tunnels, they carried one-pound blocks of pentrite high explosives, four blocks to a man, 68 pounds in all” (474). The realities of war include details such as having to carry numerous supplies required for their own survival – compresses to stop bleeding and perhaps save a life, morphine to stop pain, tranquilizers to cope with the nervous sickness that strikes in the heat of battle, the guns that are meant to kill and with which these boys themselves might be killed. In the midst of their confusion, these soldiers value frivolous or unnecessary items as a means of holding on to their ideals and fantasies. In presenting this struggle between the sentimental objects they carry and the practical, O’Brien touches on a central precept of the tragic. “The central, defining characteristic of the tragic sense of life is its insistence on the balance between the striving for rationality on the one hand, and the recognition of the underlying irrationality of existence on the other” (Rubens, 1992). Jimmy Cross cannot manage to move beyond his infatuation with the lovely Martha, a woman who has never encouraged this attachment except, perhaps, through her insistence in signing her letters to him with “Love, Martha.” The pantyhose of Henry Dobbins’ girlfriend worn about his neck both highlight his superstitious nature as well as highlights the fragility of his mental defenses against the real nature of the war around him. Although the things they carried were earlier determined by necessity, at this point in the story, “the things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good-luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit’s foot. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders” (475-476). While they try to remain focused on the strangeness of their surroundings and the unfamiliar hostility of the people around them, these soldiers cannot forget what they have left behind as they continue to allow their thoughts to be occupied by the dreams and hopes of youth. However, like the other things they carry that are the tools of war, these boys are forced to face the reality of the world around them when Lavender is shot coming back from urinating. “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. Boom. Down. Nothing else” (472). This finality has a similar ring to the finality of Frost’s poem, in which the boys are forced to simply continue forward rather than engage in a more humanly sympathetic response. Both Robert Frost and Tim O’Brien explore the dehumanizing effects of desperation as they depict the harsh living conditions of poverty and war as reality forces what might otherwise be considered inhuman reactions. Through the understanding and sympathy of the narrator in Frost’s poem, the reader is able to understand that while the family might have desired a better life, better death and greater honor given to the young boy, reality forces them to keep him working until the accident and then to return to work as soon as it is apparent that they can do nothing more to comfort or help him. The time spent tending him between the accident and his death is all they can afford to give. Similarly, the characters in O’Brien’s story are not able to hold on to anything but the most frivolous of reminders of who they once were as they struggle under the weight of the tools of trade and survival during war. Like the family of Frost’s poem, a death among them is an occasion of sadness and reflection, but is necessarily followed by an immediate return to business rather than the more human reaction of mourning and attention. Works Cited Chen, Tina. “Unraveling the Deeper Meaning’: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O’Brien’s ‘The Things They Carried’.” Contemporary Literature. Vol. 39, N. 1, (Spring 1998): 77-98. Frost, Robert. “Out, Out.” Poetry for Young People. New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 1995. Gregory, Elizabeth. “Robert Frost’s ‘Out, Out’.” Suite 101. (October 24, 2007). February 4, 2008 Lacy, Louise A. “’Out, Out’ by Robert Frost.” BookStove. (January 18, 2008). February 4, 2008 O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Short Stories since 1970. Lex Williford & Michael Martone (Eds.). New York: Touchstone, 2007: 469-483. Rubens, Richard L. “Psychoanalysis and the Tragic Sense of Life.” New Issues in Psychology. Vol. 10, N. 3, (1992): 347-362. Read More