Wednesday, February 9, 2011
In Tim O'Brien's novel, he says "They were afraid of dying but they were even more afraid to show it. They found jokes to tell .... It wasn't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors." When I first read this, I immediately thought of Vonnegut's fictitious religion Bokonon in Cat's Cradle. They are living by foma, harmless untruths, in order to survive the war. Also, each soldier feels the same way, yet they all pretend as if they don't to seem like a man, like a soldier. This reminded me of the people of San Lorenzo, all of whom practice Bokonon and know this, yet still pretend as if no one does. The soldiers act as if they are brave to be brave, to fight for their country, but mostly to stay alive. The jokes they tell and the "stage presence" they put on keep them sane, and those are the lies, or untruths, that are necessary in life.
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For some reason this quote reminded me of the " All the world's a stage/ And all men and women are merely players" from Shakespeare's "As You Like It." It made me kind of parallel the monologue and "The Things They Carried." If the soldiers are all players, who are they playing for? They are all going through the same thing, so why is there a reason for them to hide what they are feeling?
ReplyDeleteI found myself wondering the same things when I came across the comparison of the soldiers to actors. I think that this shows that O'Brian realized that there is a certain "role" a soldier is expected to take on when going to war. They are expected to be strong and courageous men when really they are boys terrified of dying. I think the comparison to an actor was also a clever metaphor because like actors, each boy knew that all of the others were hiding their own true feelings, but because of the expectation to play in the role of a soldier, they knowingly kept pretending.
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