Words as a Weapon

When I said in class on Friday that the scenes depicted in O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried were not really scenes of war, I was incorrect. Looking back, there are plenty of depictions of gory battles and warfare that are depicted. What I was noticing (I can now see with the beautiful gift of hindsight) was that the scenes weren’t really being used to tell war stories, they were used as literary tools to tell other stories.

We talked about this a little bit in class: the story of Rat Kiley and the water buffalo. This might be, for me, the most stomach-churning scene I’ve read in quite a while, and plenty of violence is described explicitly. However, as we talked about in class, the violence is there as a literary weapon, driving home the love Rat Kiley felt for Curt Lemon and the hurt he felt when his sister did not answer.

Another scene that made me think along these lines was O’Brien’s description of Kiowa’s death from Norman Bowker’s point of view. The mortar attack in the shit-field is nothing if not part of the war. It is a gruesome fast paced battle, but I think that it is used as a parallel for the helplessness Norman Bowker felt when he returned from the war. In the following chapter, Notes, the author informs us that the lake is supposed to be a parallel for the field, which leads me to believe there are many other parallels there (the Fourth of July fireworks and the mortars and flares are an example). O’Brien, I think, shows the helplessness of someone suffering a mortar attack and unable to save his friend because it shows how helpless Bowker felt once he returned from the war, especially without a Silver Star for valor.