"Spin"

“Spin” is a collection of arbitrary memories of the narrator’s experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War. The memories are brief and not told in chronological order. In addition to this, O’Brien occasionally brings the reader back to the present when he repeatedly states he’s a forty-three year old man and the war has been long over, and so forth. While some might consider the narrative jumping from the past to the present a syndrome of PTSD, O’Brien argues that this disconnection of short stories within the narrative joins the past to the future. Consequently, the readers are faced with short, fragmented memories of Tim O’Brien, while at the same time seeing the narrator jumping from the past to the present. The memories convey to the readers that there are moments that occur in war that we the readers might not necessarily perceive of. They show us that war is not all horrible. For example, O’Brien tells us about relatively funny moments that he recalls during the war such as when Azar hands a chocolate bar to a limping boy, or the time when the platoon played “follow the leader” through the rice paddies filled with land mines. Tim O’Brien’s memories also show us that in war, everything, even the smallest things, becomes noticeable. For example, Tim O’Brien remembers the quarter moon rising over the nighttime paddies, the stench scent of an empty body bag, and even the long waits in boredom that gave him horrendous stomachaches. Tim O’Brien writes, “What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” (34). From this line, it’s evident that O’Brien believes that when we remember things, we often don’t remember the entire event from the start to finish, but in small fragments that sometimes makes no sense.