The Intersection Between Past and Present - Essay Example

The Intersection between Past and Present The Vietnam War is one of the most discussed and deliberated episodes in the pages of American History, which arouses strong passionate feelings among the Americans even to this day. It was a war whose futility was a foregone conclusion, yet the leadership of the country kept feeding the fires of war. The war in retrospect has come to be seen as a campaign which gained nothing for America, with an exception of a lot of martyrs that laid down their lives for this cause. The Vietnam War spawned a whole range of fiction and non-fiction, most of them penned by men who had served with their own lives at the war’s frontline. Their stories, while being cathartic to their personal selves, provoked an emotional outrage in other fellow Americans. “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’ Brien has been often described, as a series of short stories, in which the author moves to and fro, from past to present and mirrors life before, during and after the war, as gleaned from the lives of the soldiers, who were at the epicenter of this whirlpool of pain, disillusionment and war. Tim O’ Brien has used his own experiences in the Vietnam War, to paint a graphically detailed and emotionally drenching portrait of this senseless and remorseless war. The stories are epistemological tools, intertwined by the author’s knowledge of the war, which he had encountered first hand. Tim O’ Brien exposes his own shortcomings as well as those of the other soldiers, because the stories that he tells “…swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane.” “The Things They Carried” is the story of the men who trudged through the jungles of Vietnam, burdened not so much by their knapsacks but by the burden of their grief, longing, loss and terrors. This story puts us directly in the field of action, making us one with the soldiers. The reader is an embedded entity, who marches along with the soldiers, bearing the burden of their tangible and intangible objects. Tim O’ Brien fills the narrative with a detailed description of the items the men carried with them, describing the weight of each item. Apart from these material things, “they carried gravity”, their fears and nightmares of their lives, and the love of their near and dear ones. The burden of the physical items in their baggage could be put down and relief gained, but there was no relief from the intangibles that they carried in their hearts and souls. Thus, we have the picture of a solider, carrying the pantyhose of his girlfriend as a talisman against evil, even though he was not sure whether he would meet her after the years in the jungles of Vietnam. We have another soldier Jimmy Cross, who burns his sweetheart’s letters in order to escape from her memories, but cannot escape the truth, since “the letters were in his head”. The pebble from Martha, his girlfriend, although weighing merely an ounce, was representative of the greater burden, which he carried in the form of memories attached to the innocuous pebble. In the chapter “On the Rainy River” a story set in the time before the protagonist departed for the war, we see the author Tim O’ Brien battling with his emotions. This story is about Tim’s escape to Rainy River, the boundary between the United States and Canada. Finally, the day when he gets the money, he is engulfed by remorse and guilt and decides to go back home and enlist for the army. This story is a window into the mind of a 21 year old who can see his life crumbling in front of his very own eyes. It describers the helplessness of the youth, who is caught between his moral duty towards his nation and the knowledge, that once in Vietnam, their fates were mercilessly snatched away from them. War was to be the end of their youthful dreams. It was this abject misery that had gripped the generation of youth, whose lives were being dictated to by the war in a foreign land. The gruesome face of the war is laid bare in the story of “The Man I Killed”, a killing which haunts the narrator. The author cannot erase the memory of the dead soldier, for whom he creates a personal history. He imagines the young man to be about twenty years of age, pushed into the war to keep up the honor of his family, village and country. Since Tim O’Brien has used the device of meta-fiction, wherein fiction and reality are seen to be related, and thus we see different versions of this same killing. When the narrator’s nine year old daughter confronts him with the query about him killing anybody, he feels both a yes and a no would be truthful. What he, as a young soldier was doing, was merely obeying orders, and at times killing another was the only way to save one’s own life. The impact of the war on the author was such, that in the end he was left “with faceless responsibility and faceless grief”. The various stories in the collection are memories dredged from the deepest recesses of the psyche of the men who had to witness the cruelty of the war. Some of the stories like “How to Tell a True War Story”, wherein the narrator writes a letter to a fellow soldiers sister informing him of the death of her brother, focuses on the gruesome details of the soldiers death. Upon reading the letter the sister refuses to believe that her brother could have met such a ghastly end. According to Tim O’ Brien, reporting or telling a war story is a tricky proposition, because in a war truths are contradictory. Everything is true or false according to the stand each person takes. The author also acknowledges that each story can have many versions depending on that mood of the writer. Thus, the story of Curt Lemon’s death, is “all exactly true”, but Tim O’ Brien acknowledges that the story has been told “many times, many versions” (85). Tim O’ Brien’s story is a mirror reflecting the harsh realities of a war which altered the psychology of a whole generation. It gave a new meaning to the theory of heroism, where the traditional concept of bravery has taken on a whole new meaning. In its place we have the heroism of those who stood by their brothers and finally managed to get out of the war-zone alive. Today, heroism has a different face to it. Heroism is interwoven with patriotism towards one’s country and loved ones. References: The Tim Obrien Websites. http://www.users.interport.net/m/k/mklweb/illyria.com/.../tobsites.html Jason Voegele’s Humble Abode on the Web. www.jvoegele.com The Things They Carried. www.jvoegele.com/essays/things.html Read More