After reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, I noticed very similar writing styles with Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Both authors admit that not everything they say is true. O'Brien even includes a chapter entitled "How to Tell A True War Story." After I read this chapter, I came to a conclusion that there are no war stories with the absolute truth. Like we said in class, even if we truly experienced an event, we can tell the story differently or incorrectly. We can never exactly tell someone what happened. Another similarity I noticed is that there are many versions of O'Brien as there were many versions of Jonah in Cat's Cradle. I concluded that there are several Tim O'Brien's including O'Brien as a soldier, as a writer, as a narrator, as a father, as a husband, as a son, and as a kid.
I also noticed a lot of interesting things about O'Brien's writing style. O'Brien uses a lot of repetition to evoke a sense of paralysis. The use of repetition such as the list of the things they carried or the constant mentioning of guilt makes one feel paralyzed within the specific story. For example, I could feel the sense of paralysis in, "Speaking of Courage." I could feel Norman Bowker's inability to communicate after his 12th revolution driving around his hometown. O'Brien also uses many symbols throughout each chapter. The 12 revolutions reminded me of a clock and how no matter how much time kept passing, he was unable to communicate. In Mary Anne's story, the necklace of tongues that she comes back with has a lot of meaning as well. I could argue that Mary Anne was figuratively "eaten" up by Vietnam. The cut up tongues could also symbolize the death of communication.
Through explaining how to communicate war stories and by explaining the things they carried in the Vietnam War, O'Brien emphasizes the difficulty and death of communication. Through good form, O'Brien is trying to make us feel. The stories themselves are almost irrelevant since they are not true, he just wants to communicate the emotions he felt. I think the purpose of the characters' individual stories is to the show how often "they" struggle to communicate through different stories.
I definitely agree that we never can tell someone exactly how an event took place in our memory. Somehow the memory is distorted overtime even if its just the slightest details that are altered. The story itself becomes the truth and our memory of the event becomes how we told the story. I like how you discuss the sense of paralysis that O'Brien creates. Just like Norman is trapped in his car circles with no way to share what happened to him at war, O'Brien the narrator is trapped in his story circles. He constantly writes about his and his friends' different experiences at war.
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