Are Humans The Source of All Evil?

Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O’Brien, writing about thirty years apart from one another, both write novels that claim to have no meaning. In fact, both works explicitly inform the reader that the contents inside the novel are untrue. But upon further examination and analysis of each novel, the reader finds an important message in both books, if not many. After reading both of these novels, I found myself thinking about the concept of evil, and how it seems that both authors portray the fact that human beings are the constructors of the evil present in the world. People often associate evil with malicious intent, but in both novels, evil is portrayed in a different way. In regard to Cat’s Cradle, atombomb creator Felix Hoenikker’s indifference, unawareness of surroundings, and investment in his own life, to support the claim that lacking the moral capacity to care about other people is a huge concern in terms of technological advancement. Thus, because humans create technology, there is a serious danger in technological advancement, and subsequent human survival; it seems as though science’s invention of the atomic bomb could support the claim that science has little interest in humanity’s survival. In addition, for The Things They Carried, Kiowa’s recurring death in several different chapters to emphasize the fact that there is a highly unneccessary component of wastelessness and carelessness that goes along with war. Also, in the chapter "The Man I Killed," O'Brien the narrator repeats himself numerous times regarding the physical appearance of the dead man, but he also invents a story of the man's life, making O'Brien seem even more guilty but also somewhat evil, in that he acted in a profoundly immoral and malevolent way.

My Shitty Everything Draft(s)

I write pretty shitty everything drafts, and I absolutely love it; but it’s a good thing that they are just “drafts”. I don’t usually know what I want to say when I begin a writing assignment; be it an essay, thesis argument, or, hell, a weekly blog post, I typically go into it with no idea what the final outcome/message/topic will be. I sit down, type out all of my ideas and pray that one of them is good enough for me to continue upon and flesh-out. If you ask me, this is a halfway decent system. Sure, I am a little biased since this is the method/style of writing that I have employed since the beginning of my writing career. None-the-less, the idea of sitting down and typing everything that comes into mind, only before going back and editing is a novel system if you ask me. I find it to be a liberating and innovative approach to writing. Call it unsupported self-justification, but I find the conventional style of writing, that being with structured outlines and a ‘back-bone’ plan to be to binding and final. When my ideas can just flow, I find that I have an unbridled ability to find connections that I could not have found before through the absolute and rigid system of “this is your outline, do not deviate from it or else”. While my writing style is messy, and I will not deny that fact, I do not regret it one bit. As Lamott writes in the first full sentence on page 29, “Tidiness suggests that something is as good as it going to get”. I know my writing can always be better, and if I am locked into the ‘tidiness’ of an outline, my ingenious connections become stifled and suppressed. Therefore, I wholeheartedly argue for my ability to write shitty everything drafts; first, second, third, whatever it takes to get my first non-draft to be perfect.

The Miracle of Lies

I've often found that someone's best writing comes from the heart, from a place of hurt, passions, and emotions. So that's what I'm going to do now. At first, I wasn't sure if I should put myself out there like this, but I will because I suppose by putting it out there for others to see, it will solidify my purpose and may even show a greater literary significance.

When I was reading the end of The Things They Carried, as O'Brien described Timmy's love for Linda and her subsequent death, I experienced something rather unexpected.

For a while now, I have known that my friend is dying. Over winter break, she was diagnosed with a severe metabolic disorder that causes her body to deteriorate rapidly. She has received treatment, but not even the doctor's know if it worked yet and they won't know for a while. So for now, her life is in some strange limbo, trapped at the point of no return, suspended at the point of acceptance and acquiescence to her fate.

I've known about this for at least a month now and up until now, I had ignored it. I have been pretending that everything my friend told me was a lie or some strange hyperbole that would ultimately give way to an underwhelming, more reasonable reality. I had been lying to myself so I could, perhaps selfishly, go on as if nothing ever happened.

That all changed as I read the end of O'Brien's novel. As I read the passage describing young Linda's death, I felt a surge of emotions I had been waiting for. As I listened to Nick Veenhof tell Timmy how Linda had kicked the bucket, I didn't hear Linda's name but instead, my friend's name. As I watched Timmy close his eyes and whisper Linda's name out of a desperate attempt to bring her back, I saw myself, whispering my friend's name, desperately hoping that she too would come back. And as I watched Timmy look in disbelief at Linda's corpse, I didn't see Timmy at all. Instead, I saw myself, looking at my best friend's dead face, looking at her dead fragile hands, looking down at my friend's dead body.

And I cried. I cried for the first time after hearing about her diagnosis and I cried for the first time ever after reading a book.

Now, of course, this post isn't about my friend's suffering, much like how O'Brien's book isn't necessarily about Vietnam. In that moment of realization, when I finally felt the long-awaited catharsis, I was experiencing the central action of O'Brien's book and a manifestation of Vonnegut's message. Both books undoubtedly discuss how lies function as a coping mechanism in the face of man's bleak existence, whether that existence is ravaged by war or is absolutely meaningless. Vonnegut mocks man's desperate need to believe in lies like religion and social groups in order to handle the meaningless of the reality he lives in. Similarly, the characters within O'Brien's story and arguably O'Brien himself tell themselves stories as a means of coping with the war and death itself. Fiction, in both cases, is a survival mechanism.

That's what I experienced. I experienced the power of fiction--the power of lies--to help a human being cope. As I read the end of O'Brien's novel, and even here, now, as I invent myself, I confront the terrible reality at hand and I learn to cope with it. And while my experience with the novel is perhaps accidental and highly individualized, it nonetheless illustrates the miracle of all writing and storytelling, the miracle of enabling people, in the face of perilous hopelessness, to live on.

Authors

Physically speaking, all writing is the same thing. It it a series of words strung together recorded in some form or another. Writers attempt to create the most meaningful experience for the reader from this act. When Vonnegut and O'Brien include writers within their own pages, they are encouraging us to really look for what makes a writer good at what he is doing. Whereas it may seem that O'Brien writes more instructively about storytelling, Vonnegut too incorporates believability into Cat's Cradle. As a reader, I know that I feel as though the ever-mysterious Jonah is in fact a good one; I am given no reason to believe that he isn't. If their characters can convince us that they are the source of what we are reading, doesn't that make the actual authors twice as persuasive?

What is the point of books?

    Kurt Vonnegut and Tim O'Brien do an amazing job of deceiving the reader and sending ideas, however, many of their ideas seem very pointless if you look at the end result. Tim O'Brien's story telling are a series of self treatments for his lost innocence with the byproduct of describing the emotion of the Vietnam war. Kurt Vonnegut tells us to balance religion and science, something that people do on a daily basis. What is it about empowering ourselves that makes it really worth it? So what if you can list off reasons for your balance between science and religion, its all due each persons version of reality. So if people are reaching the same conclusion without all the trouble what is the point? And in extension what is the point of books then, if they will lead people to generic conclusions?

White Lies?

     The last few sentences of The Things They Carried particularly caught my eye. Not only are they masterfully put together, they leave us with a significant amount of insight into O'Brien's current state. The passage transitions from a memory of Linda to a metaphor to a dark realization.

     Much of our discussion in class was centered around O'Brien and his presentation of stories in the book. In class, we question whether it matters that these are stories or are the ideas and emotions that we get from them enough. In my attempts to mentally label everything as truths, Truths, or lies (I acknowledge that these categories are very loosely placed together and change with the perspectives of different people), I wasn't sure with what to do with the stories. I put them in the category of truths, because they held such an important place in O'Brien's mind. In the last sentence though, he says “I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story,” revealing the blinding effect of stories. As we began to question in Cat's Cradle though, are these lies we tell ourselves necessarily bad? Tim finds himself in distress in the present and seems to find some happiness in the image of Linda. As we've found, the stories are helpful to those who find a need to live in them.   

Why Does it Matter?

         

I decided to reread parts of The Things They Carried keeping in mind everything we already discussed in class about truth and the way Tim O’Brien portrays the truth in his book.  As I read through a few chapters I questioned what the importance of truth is to the book.  The narrator, Tim O’Brien is constantly repeating how he remembers this and that and mentions on multiple occasions how something is true, very matter of factly.  After I reread “How To Tell A True War Story” and in particularly the story Mitchell Sanders shares about the soldiers listening in the mountain, I realized that Sanders is desperate O’Brian to believe his story the same way the author O’Brien is desperate for his readers to read his book as though it is true.

            The truth is very relative.  Whether you read the book as true or not, the importance is what you take away from it.  O’Brien writes the book making a the main character a construct of himself and a story line based off of an actual war so the readers are forced to find more truth in the story than there might actually be.  If The Things They Carried is an outlet for the real Tim O’Brien to rehash his past, than he is constructing a piece of fiction made to seem true for his readers to feel empathy and understanding.

Reality vs Truth

“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.

‘Daddy tell the truth,’ Kathleen can say, ‘did you ever kill anybody?’ And I can say honestly, ‘Of course not.’

Or I can say, honestly, ‘Yes.’” (172, The Things They Carried)

In both The Things They Carried and Cat’s Cradle, there is a clear focus on experience over the happening truth. These novels help us bring to light our misuse of the word truth. True is defined as “in accordance with fact or reality”. While truth may be what we consider to be a fact or the happening truth, truth is also reality, which is not synonymous with fact. In Cat’s Cradle especially, we see that the facts of the lives of the people of San Lorenzo is much different than their reality, all because of their experience or perspective.  What these people tell themselves to get through the facts of their lives creates a reality which is much different, making it the truth.

As the quotation explains, Tim O’Brien can create a new truth for himself based upon perspective and emotion. O’Brien explains that through reliving these moments he can tackle fears and recreate his reality. The epigraph of this novel shows us how relatable this book is based on this reality and creates a truth for readers of similar experience. Reality is not only important, it is the truth.

Deception

In the last class we discussed that The Things They Carried is completely fictional. The stories within the novel are used for entertainment in keeping the reader amused with the plot line. The overall story is based in the time frame of Vietnam, but never once was the war actually mentioned in the novel. O'Brien only uses it as a framework for the interlining stories within the novel, which the main subject matter is love.
The matter within the book is 90% invented. However, O'Brien makes you feel like all that is going on in the novel is real. It is the way he involves the reader in his works that makes it hard to question the line between what is real and what is not. In Cat's Cradle, it was easier to find that line based off the pretext of the book. It stated that everything in the book was a lie, where in TTTC, O'Brien uses a real quote as his pretext. However, his quote about a Civil War instead of the Vietnam, so without the research on would believe all that is in the novel is true.
Both works are a way of reliving a major point in life. Vonnegut is writing his story about the atomic bomb dropping, bringing back the memories people experienced that day, where O'Brien is doing the same with the Vietnam war. Only he is doing through love memories and not "actual" ones.

Harsh Reality, Happy Lies: Is the truth worth it?

O'Brien (the character) is happiest when he dreams his friends to be alive.  Upon reflecting on these thoughts, he knows fully well that he is lying to himself.  Even with Linda, who he has been keeping alive through dreams for nearly 30 years, he admits to the reader, "She's not the embodied Linda; she's mostly made up, with a new identity and a new name, like the man who never was" (232).  It's these dreams that keeps O'Brien "young and happy" (233).  Timmy is the blissful, ignorant, and young version of himself that he can only achieve - and keep alive - through his stories and dreams.  Tim is the other side; the side of O'Brien who addresses the reader and admits to loss and sorrow, and to the addiction to carrying the lives of his friends on his shoulders.

As much as we, as human beings, are in constant search for what is true and what is reality, is the truth worth the pain and suffering?  Is there something to be said about the benefit of living in an ignorant bliss?  If emotions are the truest part of life, why not just live in a dream and be happy?

Who is Norman Bowker?

This book is a work of fiction, and therefore the people Tim O’Brien wrote about are not real and the stories are not factual. However, the way Tim O’Brien wrote this book makes you wonder if some of these stories and characters are in fact real. An example of this can be found with the character Norman Bowker, especially in the chapter “Notes”. In that chapter, the narrator Tim O’Brien discusses the story he told in the previous chapter called “Speaking of Courage”. In the chapter “Notes”, it feels like Tim O’Brien the author is narrating, causing the chapter to read more like a memoir. Due to that, it leads the reader to believe that what he wrote about was factual, along with the people he wrote about. The meta-textual chapters such as this one cause the line between the author Tim O’Brien and the narrator Tim O’Brien to become fuzzy. When that distinction becomes confusing, the characters become confusing as well.  To complicate matters even more, O’Brien includes Norman Bowker in the dedication page. Typically books are dedicated to real people, not fictional characters. I wonder why O’Brien chose to do this? Maybe Norman Bowker represents many men that served in the war, and by dedicating this book to that character, he is actually dedicating the book to all of those men.

Not Just War Stories

In class we discussed the meaning behind this book or what the purpose of the book is. I initially thought the book acted as a coping mechanism for the author Tim O'Brien, so he could talk openly about what happened in Vietnam. This seemed like a clear answer because of the similarity of this fictitious book to a memoir of war stories. However at the end of the book, he introduced Linda. After Linda was brought in, O'Brien started talking about the impact stories can have on people. On page 213, he writes "stories can save us... in a story, which is kind of like dreaming, the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world". He repeats this idea on page 230 when he describes how he used stories to bring Linda alive in his sleep.

At the end of the book, the point of the story seems to be more about bringing memories to life, so maybe the book isn't exactly about coping, maybe it's about reliving. Reliving could include coping, but coping reminds me of something you have to deal with, and reliving seems more celebratory. Right in the beginning of the book, O'Brien describes the purpose of stories. He writes "sometimes remembering will lead to a story, which makes it forever" and "stories are for joining the past to the future... for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story" (36). Janelle (I think) said something in class about this book is less about Vietnam, and more about the stories that are just told in the setting of Vietnam. These aren't just war stories, they're a recreation of memories, people and emotions. These war stories have meaning that isn't apparent at first.

Coping

We spent last class discussing the fact that, at the end of the day, The Things They Carried is a fictional novel. No matter how attached we became to the characters, no matter how close to the war we felt, no matter how similar the novel is Tim O’Brien’s memoir... Coincidence? Maybe. At this point, I don’t want to say anything is true, or that I am sure of anything…

I still think that writing is O’Brien’s coping mechanism with the war. Irrelevant of what the stories say, what his interviews say, or what his memoir says, he clearly likes to write about war without actually writing about war.

The chapter “Notes” is a metachapter, telling us how to read the rest of the book. O’Brien claims in this chapter “I did not look on my work as therapy, and still don’t. Yet when I received Norman Bowker’s letter, it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse” (152). So, he claims this is not therapy, yet somehow his repressed memories happen to not be paralyzed because he decided to write them down. He still explains in this chapter that he did, however, base chapters off of real stories while adding in other details.

At the end of the day, at the core of this book, are war stories. They aren’t moral, they make us feel skeptical and they do not talk about the actual war. Every veteran needs a way to cope with the reality they once lived; O’Brien’s mechanism was to write that reality.

I might be wrong, I might be right. We probably will never actually know what O’Brien went through during his time in Vietnam, we will never know if the stories we read actually happened (even if they have added details), but at least we have a great book to read.

"The Lives of the Dead" and its Significance

Near the end of The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien shifts the focus of the novel away from war stories. “The Lives of The Dead” starts just like most other chapters, set in a small village in Vietnam.  The author describes how he felt awkward and detached while the other members of his platoon shook hands with a dead man, in a strange sort of ritual. He then shifts the focus to the much younger “Timmy” with a lengthy flashback recounting his first true love Linda.

            In this story the reader gets to explore the deepest emotions of O’Brien, similar to when he was considering fleeing to Canada. He explains how he tells stories to keep the dead “alive,” and how story telling is a cathartic procedure. With so many anecdotes and stories from his time in Vietnam, O’Brien is preserving the lives of these men who would otherwise be forgotten. He admits that by writing stories, he is trying to “save Timmy’s life with a story” (233). To me, this admission made the whole purpose of the novel evident. It made sense that he went into such great detail about the man he killed, simply because he wanted to preserve him and his legacy, creating another world in which the young man went on to become a scholar of mathematics.

            Nevertheless, the back of the book clearly states fiction as its genre, and the author himself simply said that he was simply writing fictional stories. This information still confuses me. I think that O’Brien included these deeply emotional segments in his book simply because they are tantalizing and thought provoking, and encourage the reader to question him or herself.