As O’Brien lists the things carried, he does more than demonstrate the weight of the war on these young soldiers. Through his depiction of the soldiers carrying their various weights throughout Vietnam, he shows the entrapment of these young men in a system, progressing only because it’s the next step required of them. The habit of these soldiers seems to be somehow both meaningful and meaningless. Although their trek can be explained under the guise of war, O’Brien suggests that this applied meaning is faulty as O’Brien (the character now [if we can really say there’s a difference]) describes his response to the perspectives on war held by those in his hometown saying, “I detested their blind, thoughtless, automatic acquiescence to it all, their simple minded patriotism, their prideful ignorance, their love-it-or-leave-it platitudes, how they were sending me off to fight a war they didn’t understand and didn’t want to understand.” (43)
Perhaps we can see similarities between this meaningless system and the depiction of meaningless systems Vonnegut perpetuates with the symbol of the cat’s cradle within Cat’s Cradle. Within both Cat’s Cradle and The Things They Carried, characters seem to be primarily working within a greater system (or what they believe to be a greater system) in which the only objective seems to be the one falsely applied in an effort to create meaning. Just as the game of cat’s cradle is only made meaningful through the separation of each individual move, the experiences of O’Brien and his men are most meaningful when broken out of the expansive system of war and into individual stories. Although these meanings are applied to explain a long and weighty war, the war remains meaningless; it again resembles Newt’s interpretation of the Cat’s Cradle- “No damn cat, no damn cradle.”
I agree with you, Emily, that in a lot of ways the Vietnam War was a construct, a "cradle" so to speak. Many of the soldiers in the novel believed that going to war was the only thing to do once they were drafted, but that thinking only came from American society, ideas that may or may not have been true.
ReplyDeleteHowever, these constructs are also somewhat necessary. The Vietnam War was how O’Brien and the rest of his platoon came of age, and wound up being vital to their constitutions later in life. The war affected how an entire generation thought, created and invented.
We see the meaningless of death and the war through the eyes of Tim, Kiowa and the rest of the platoon, but we also see the meaninglessness of life, like in the case of Mary Anne. Mary Anne felt far more alive in Vietnam than she ever did in suburban America, even though she was safer there. In a lot of ways, the “construct” that was Vietnam helped the men see life better, and the war was necessary as they sought out meaning in the abyss of reality.
I definitely agree with you analogy as well, and I would even go so far as to say that O’Brien repeatedly emphasizes the meaninglessness of war in the chapter “How to tell a True War Story.” A true war story has no meaning and no moral, according to O’Brien. This view of war story runs parallel to the fact that war in the book as a whole is portrayed as meaningless and mind numbing. He says that a true war story “does not instruct, nor encourage virtue” (65). The book itself is a war story, and as such, it is not meant to portray meaning, rather a lack of meaning.
ReplyDeleteI can definitely see similarities in the two situations, but I believe that the most distinct difference is that in Cat's Cradle, the author attempts to illuminate the fact that there is nothing in the cradle, but in The Things They Carried, the author attempts to show the reader that there is in fact a cat and a cradle. There is meaning in the novel and in the war, it is just not the patriotic propaganda which one would expect. It is a love story, and O'Brien does his best to show us that there is something real and that it does matter.
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