Kathleen

Today in class, we talked about how Kathleen may represent the portion of readers that have not experienced the Vietnam War. I re-read the section where Kathleen visits Vietnam with Tim (the writer), and I am now even more convinced that O’Brien(the author) wrote his readers into the story as his daughter to represent the inadequacy of the reaction he receives from the general public. As Tim is going through Vietnam, he wants “to take [his] daughter to the places [he’d] seen as a soldier. [He] want[s] to show her the Vietnam that kept [him] awake at night” (176). Tim feels so strongly about the places he visits, yet Kathleen’s reaction is “‘That’s weird.’” (175). She represents the reader that has no idea what happened in the war, and does not understand a former soldier’s reactions to all the stimuli that comes from re-visiting that time. His ordeals are “as remote to her as cavemen and dinosaurs” (175). This represents the reader’s reactions to O’Brien’s true war stories. They don’t have the necessary elements to make the audience feel what he has felt, which is why he writes this novel as fiction, and halfway through, tells the audience that although all the stories are lies, it does not matter. Kathleen’s reaction to her father’s journey to Vietnam is placed into the novel to show the reader what the reaction to a true war story is. There need to be lies to make the feelings present. The details don’t matter, simply the feelings behind them, and I feel that this chapter is O’Brien’s peace offering. I think he is saying, “Yes, these stories are all lies and none of them actually happened, but here is what your reaction would be if I told you the plain truth.”  Without the lies, the general public wouldn’t feel the same as soldiers enduring the war. They would react as Kathleen does, with tolerance and concealed boredom. Instead, O’Brien brings the feelings of the war right into the readers’ lives. I see this chapter as an explanation of that logic.