Personal Insights of Henrik Ibsen`s A Doll`s House and Tim O`Brien`s The Things They Carried - Book Report/Review Example

Personal Insights of Henrik Ibsen`s “A Doll`s House” and Tim O`Brien`s “The Things They Carried” Despite obvious differencebetween Ibsen`s play and O`Brien`s short story in thematic and compositional plans, they still have one important thing in common. Their main heroes evolve and make progress throughout the literary text, they do not remain stable and artificial in their perception of the world. Their thoughts and their narratives about life, personality, and society progress depending on the situation and the behavior of close people with whom they interact. They are socially responsible, their relationships with the surrounding are active and relevant to the situation. Nora from “The Doll`s House” as well as Jimmy Cross from “The Things They Carried” are dynamic characters who are not afraid of changing and dividing past from present. This possibility to create new narratives in response to the changes of reality differentiates artificial heroes having no connection to human beings from heroes in which readers see themselves. The protagonist of “The Things That They Carried” is put in the conditions where the value of life is felt rather critically due to constant risk of injury and the threat of death. This is a men`s world with enormous danger and constant choice of tactics. The world of the principle character of the “Doll`s House” is a quiet and comfortable world of a woman with its little worries and pleasant home troubles. This is a patriarchal world in which women know their secondary role. Still it is possible to compare personages existing in parallel universes because they both receive a huge and painful impulse from life that make them change: in one case the hero faces death while in the other the main protagonist deals with the betrayal of a close person. So what illusory worlds did these characters create for themselves and what narratives accompany these illusions? Nora, a young and happy mother and a wife, lived in illusion of an ideal family in which all the roles were divided between spouses rationally: a man earns money while a woman takes care of the family. Such position satisfied Nora for a very long time. She supposed that the husband who took responsibility for her in marriage would be always loyal and accepting. Her vision of the world was rather narrow, she viewed their house as some micro cosmos in which she felt she could remain infantile herself. Asking her husband for some money she keeps joking and playing: “Nora [smiling quietly and happily]. You havent any idea how many expenses we skylarks and squirrels have, Torvald”. But the power and of Nora`s character consists in evolution that she is capable of experiencing. It happens when the heroine tries a new social role for her- a role of the person responsible for her own life. Nora was a creature dependent completely on the men around her that is how she became a gentle, naïve, and frivolous woman with some slight degree of craftiness. She knew how to attract men and how to flirt with them, she also could be cruel to them sometimes. She did not miss a chance to mock over Doctor Rank who she knew was in love with her. But this is a visible side of Nora, which is comfortable for her family and her husband first of all. Once she found courage to commit a crime for the sake of relatives and lived many years with painful memory about the offense, paying off the debt secretly from her husband. But with appearance of a fatal character- Krogstard, traditional for Ibsen “the person from outside" everything changed. And then it turns out that this nice and quite woman was only visible part. Her real essence is revealed gradually and is crystalized eventually when her last hopes about gratitude and mercy from her husband disappear. Nora realizes that she cannot play the role of a happy housewife, a doll in the house where she does not decide anything anymore. When she finds out that her ideas about life are naive, infantile and wrong, she dares to make an honest and truthful conclusion about herself: she has no right to be neither a wife, nor a mother. She just starts being someone in this world: “I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one.” And in order to make something important and real in her illusory life Nora decides to leave. Her leaving a family is not hysterical but balanced and accurate decision, and Nora will not return under any condition. Her changes are irrevocable because they are painful and the price she paid for these changes is too high to return. Similar situation happens to the hero of “The things that they carried” lieutenant Jimmy Cross. He lives in another illusion - an illusion of mutual love. The girl he has crush on is his college girlfriend Martha whom he writes letters regularly. Cross carries the souvenirs which remind him of Martha day and night: her letters and photographs. For him these are not simple letters, these are the things that bring luck and keep him away from death. These letters serve as an epitome of their love. For quite a long time he seems not to pay attention to the fact that the girl does not mention the war itself and does not define her feelings towards him. He does not have her moral and emotional support but Cross allows Martha being uninvolved because it is the only way for him to support this illusion further. Probably he is afraid to realize the truth until a certain moment due to constant stress of a war. The image of Martha helps him to cope with the atrocities of war and gives him strength but any illusion is harmful as it makes a person see reality in a distorted way. Cross creates an immaculate image of Martha`s virginity (though sometimes he fantasizes about her sexual experience simultaneously) and clings to it. Trying to escape from painful reality of the war he dives into constant daydreaming and fantasies about Martha. He puts a stone she send him into his mouth to make feelings even more intense and to distract himself from pain and fatigue. Cross thinks about the past with her and about their common future and does not notice what is happening around. Nevertheless, a war is not the time and a place to dream, it is necessary to keep constant contact with reality as every mistake can take away someone`s life. In Cross`s situation living in illusory world is punished more severely than in Nora`s- he loses one of his soldiers he is in charge of. The insult of such power brings the protagonist back to reality helping him to reassess critically his infatuation: “In part, he was grieving for Ted Lavender, but mostly it was for Martha, and for himself, because she belonged to another world, which was not quite real, and because she was a junior at Mount Sebastian College in New Jersey, a poet and a virgin and uninvolved, and because he realized she did not love him and never would”. The insight about himself is so painful for the protagonist that he decides to burn Martha`s letters punishing himself for “loving Martha more than loving his guys”. This gesture is sentimental and symbolic as it marks the point of a new narrative – real and trustworthy. The hate Cross feels towards Martha and towards himself allows him moving further and developing as a personality. Therefore, both heroes face a serious clash of illusions caused by a painful event at some significant point of their lives. In Nora`s case the reaction of her husband makes the woman realize her infantile and naïve character while in Jimmy`s situation a death of a soldier helps to understand that his love to his girlfriend is unrequited. These events allow the heroes to shape new actual narratives about themselves and evolve as people. Read More