In The Things They Carried O’Brien really sets the stage, so to speak, for the rest of the book. His style is as equally dramatic as the content of his writing. His poetic form and repetition sets the tone beautifully for the detailed, intimate, yet dry description of the Vietnam War. It’s a really thrilling sensation that the narrator is invested in telling the story, but not emotional.
Which is in stark contrast to what he’s writing about. From the way Lieutenant Cross idolizes and daydreams about Martha to the moment Rat Kiley is killed and Kiowa ponders dumbfounded over the way he fell to the ground. The material itself is emotionally charged. In every situation where O’Brien portrays what the soldiers are carrying, he does so in a elegiac way. When he talks about the gear everyone carries, he makes sure to include the weight to emphasize the burden, he talks about the keepsakes the men have to comfort them and serve as a solemn reminder of a life they left behind, even to how he describes their physical condition as carrying disease and Vietnam itself; the dirt and the grime.
He doesn’t really introduce his characters in a conventional way where the narrator tells us who they are. O’Brien instead chooses to throw the character into the story and just lets the reader learn about the character based on what’s going on in the story and allows us an omniscient perspective into what the men are thinking.
Readers have so much insight crammed into a few paragraphs that they’re immersed in the story without even realizing it. I found myself constructing a simulated environment for the story to unfold, one in which I knew what the individual characters were afraid of, how they planned to hope, and even what they’re plan for survival was.
Very nice post! I definitely agree with what you said about why O’Brien chose to emphasize the items that they were carrying. There is so much symbolism in all the weight put on them. It is not just their bodies that are weighed down, but their hearts, minds, consciences, and souls. War itself is a weight. It is a weight on the men who fight in them, on the countries that participate in them, on the lives destroyed by them. I also like your points about the way that O’Brien writes. I found his narrative to be almost like a diary. It is very intimate and extremely poetic.
ReplyDeleteI was also impressed with how O'Brien wrote about such emotionally charged things without letting his own emotions warp his writing (or at least not letting on if they were.) For me, what I really enjoyed was the way he changed his tone through different parts of the story. His writing isn't static; it's very dynamic and adapts to best suite the situation he's describing and the particular details that he's trying to put emphasis on. I also wrote about the symbolic weight in my own post and how he went into specific detail of the weights of each item that the men were carrying. At first, it seems like he's giving a very dry and unnecessarily specific description of their physical burdens, but I think it goes much deeper than that. On a subconscious level, it puts the idea of weight into the readers' head. This may be a stretch, but I think that this incredibly specific description isn't just to talk about the symbolic meaning behind each item; before O'Brien even gets into the symbolism he's made you start thinking about it through this idea of weight. So that when he does finally start talking about the symbolic Weight on these soldiers, the reader has already been subconsciously working on the the concept of weight and is ready to accept those ideas. O'Brien's writing is all very clever, and I can't wait to read more of it.
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