What does O’Brien want the reader to carry? I think he wants us to carry what he and the other soldiers carried/are carrying. His stories, based on truths and lies, aren’t told for us to criticize or decipher, they are told as an attempt to make the reader feel what they (the soldiers) felt. I feel like O’Brien wrote this book because in “If I Die in a Combat Zone” he had to tell the truth; he didn’t have a chance to let him imagination go wild so the reader could get the meaning he was trying to put across. Like he said “I was afraid to speak directly, afraid to remember --- and in the end the piece had been ruined by a failure to tell the full and exact truth about our night in the shit field” (O’Brien 159). That quote is referring to his non-fiction book. In contrast, this quote is referring to his fiction book: “I can look at things I never looked at. I can attach faces to grief and love and pity and god. I can be brave. I can make myself feel again (O’Brien 180). He loves writing fiction because he can basically say what he wants and can make the reader believe that it’s the truth. Not that it matters, but it does mess with your mind a bit; like when he says that he can honestly say he’s never killed anyone and at the same time that he has killed someone.
Another point I want to bring up is how O’Brien ended with not a war story, but with a love story. Linda’s story was told wholeheartedly and in a way that makes it seem as if Tim and Linda had been soul mates for years. What the reader feels while reading that specific story is exactly what O’Brien was trying to get at.
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ReplyDeleteIt agree with both points that you made. For the first point you mentioned that this story is to carry what he carried or what the soldiers carried. "... they carried their lives,the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries of the unknown." (O'Brien 15,16). So, O'Brien would not only give the readers of the materialistic perception of the things they carried but the heavier burdens that are not seen by the naked eye. I found it interesting that he suddenly mentioned Linda. It seemed awkward to talk something like that all of a sudden when it does not really deal with the war. On the other hand, at this point in the book he starts explaining what the whole point of the book was. It started to get emotional he portrayed what the soldiers meant to him and what he had to do keep them alive,"I keep dreaming Linda alive. Ted Lavender, too, and Kiowa, and Curt Lemon...They're all dead...But in a story...the dead sometimes smile and sit up..." ( O'Brien 225).
ReplyDeleteNow mentioning an emotional perception of what the soldiers meant to him flows in well with what he feels about Linda,"When I write about her now...it's tempting to dismiss it as a crush, an infatuation of childhood, but I know for a fact...deep and rich love."(O'Brien 228). This just puts the thought of violence aside and shines a more kinder light on the soldiers. Which would make your point true on the fact that this is actually a love story.
I like the opening of your post, b/c it takes a decidedly anti-didactic approach to the novel: it isn't about interpretation, it is about feeling. And your use of the contrasting quotes above nicely supports this idea. Of course, we can only come to this idea through interpretation/analysis... so O'Brien has certainly put us in a bit of a quandry!
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