The Value in Having Something to Talk About (or lack thereof)

I was initially worried about this week's blog post, because it had been a long time since we wrapped up our discussion of Cat's Cradle. I then realized that a blog, in addition to hopefully helping others think about things that they wouldn't necessarily have thought of on their own, is a personal checkup. It gives the person writing it a record that gives a snapshot of their emotions and thoughts at a certain point in time. While it has been a long time since we wrapped up discussion of Cat's Cradle, that same discussion has also had time to settle and that allows me to explore the ideas that really stuck with me, and how I wrestled with them over the past few days.

I don't agree with the idea that Jonah and Bokonon are one in the same. The main reason that I think they remain separate is that there are no overt reasons why they would be the same person. While Vonnegut may overtly lie at many points in this book, this does not mean that he would sacrifice his integrity or quality as a writer. I think that Vonnegut's argument about lies is more effective with Bokonon as the creator of the religion, almost an analog for Vonnegut, and Jonah someone for the reader to learn about the value of lies/Bokononism from.

Memory

After dissecting Cat's Cradle in class, initially with a close reading of the pretext and the first few pages, I decided to try a similar method when starting The Things They Carried. In the pretext of Cat's Cradle, we were able to determine early on that we should be wary of what we read in the book. In the pretext it said, "Nothing in this book is true," but we did not know according to who or what exactly the "book" constituted. The pretext none-the-less made us approach the text with hesitation. The pretext of The Things They Carried says, "Those who have had any such experience as the author will see its truthfulness at once, and to all other readers it is commended as a statement of actual things by one who experienced them to the fullest." Because the quote comes from John Ransom's Andersonville Diary, a true story account of a Civil War prison camp, I thought Ransom seemed trustworthy. Here, it seems that our questions on the trustworthiness of the text will not come from the narrator as much as it will come from the narrator's memory. We are being told from the point of view of John Ransom, that anyone who has experienced war (like he has) will find truth in the book, and if you have not experienced war, you can trust that the events really happened. But to what extent? Only time will tell.

What can we learn from the Books of Bokonon?

On the final page of Cat’s Cradle Kurt Vonnegut turns the story on itself and converges the layers of narration.  The narrator finally meets Bokonon who shows the narrator the final passage in The Books of Bokonon.

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

Here, the multiple narratives of the novel converge. The history of human stupidity, a book within John’s narrative, is revealed to likely be John’s book, which is Cat’s Cradle itself, written by Kurt Vonnegut. Since the narratives converge, we can read Bokonon’s advice to John as Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to the reader. The end of the novel reveals that the whole storyline led to basically nothing. It was a great big story that ended with the death of all humanity. In the final line, Vonnegut thumbs his nose at us the readers for falling for his trick. He challenges us to, not kill ourselves, but break the status quo. Rather than kill himself with the masses like most of San Lorenzo did, Bokonon/John/Vonnegut would climb the never-before-climbed Mt. McCabe and kill himself there. Vonnegut is sticking our faces in our tendency to blindly trust the writer and pushing us to break away from societal norms. He wants to challenge generally accepted “truths” and question everything.

The In-Between

This is not the first time I have read The Things They Carried. With that being said, this is the first time I have read The Things They Carried after starting this class. I read this book keeping this new concept of an “unreliable narrator” in the back of my head. O’Brien is much more straightforward than Vonnegut. He is also writing about the Vietnam War, which actually happened, whereas Vonnegut wrote about a clearly fictional plot including a substance that destroyed the whole world. Therefore, I deduced that O’Brien was at least somewhat trustworthy. I did some research on O’Brien to determine his credibility.

Side note: When I typed research, all I could think about was the Cat’s Cradle reference to research. Ya know, when you are “re-searching” for something. Weird.

Anyway, from good ol’ reliable Wikipedia, I found that O’Brien was a Vietnam War Veteran. Also, he did go to Macalester for his undergraduate degree and then Harvard University for his graduate diploma, like he boasted in his book. Ok. His story checks out. But then why are we reading it? He has to by lying about something!

Upon further reading, I stumbled upon a chapter titled Good Form. I do not want to spoil this for anyone who has not read this far yet, but this chapter describes how to form a “good story”.  O’Brien states that the stories in the book actually occurred but some are embellished to make the reader feel as if he were actually in Vietnam with him. “What stories can do, I guess, is to make things present” (172). It appears this book is in-between fictional tales and non-fiction war stories. O’Brien does not tell us when he is embellishing these stories, but does indicate many of the events actually happened. Earlier in the book, Mitchell Sanders scolds Rat Kiley on his improper story-telling technique, saying that he is ruining the flow. The storyteller is a very powerful person. He has the power to manipulate the readers. It is up to us to decide what is true, and what is added for effect.

Bearing the Unbearable

          "You endure what is unbearable, and you bear it”. This was a quote I read once and it has stuck with me because I see the truth in it. Somehow we get through what at the time seems impossible. We find some way to bear the unbearable. For me sometimes it can just be a crazy week of exams. All the stress piles up and it feels like all the work can’t physically be done, but then somehow I make it through. In The Things They Carried, all of the characters carry the weight of so much more. They endure the unbearable life of war and find different ways to cope.

The narrator gives a measure to how much certain things weigh on their backs. However, there is no measuring the mental weights and emotions the men carry. These men carry fear, loss, sorrow, guilt, and cowardice. Tim O’Brien cannot carry all of his emotions inside so he seems to use writing as a way to cope, to relieve some of the burden by telling war stories. Also, when O’Brien is drafted he has to choose which burden to bear: the guilt and atrocities of war, or the embarrassment of running away and being thought a coward. Ultimately he decides he would rather bear the weight of war than the weight of the shame. Jimmy Cross bears the atrocities of war by dreaming of Martha and creating a fantasy life. However, when Lavender dies, Cross blames himself because he was not focused on his troops. He takes this guilt as another burden to bear. As a way to cope with this new weight he decides to remove the physical memories of Martha from his life by burning her letters and pictures. It is an attempt to find redemption in what he blames himself for. He no longer wants his love for her to affect how he acts around his men. Additionally, Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley cope with war by making jokes and playing games as they hike.

Neverending Cat's Cradle

The ending of Cat's Cradle was definitely beyond what I had imagined. Who could have predicted that everyone would die from ice-nine and that the sky would turn into worms? Well, not me. Despite the bizarre ending, I found the book to be very profound. If I could choose one word or phrase to describe the ending, it would be "never-ending". By "never-ending", I mean it in the sense that the ending message continues and will continue to be relevant to our reality outside of the book. Although the epigraph of the book says that nothing in this book is true, meaningless is still meaning. Everything is an illusion. The book, the news and the facts are all an illusion. So how can we distinguish between that and reality? Because we are constantly asking this question, we can call the ending of Cat's Cradle never-ending. The things we can look to must be transparent, but even then we can never be completely sure. 

So what do we do with this? Do we keep believing in the lies and the illusion? Do we look to science and/or religion? Seeing as to how both science and religion came together at the end of the book to cause the day the world could have ended, it doesn't seem like a very good idea. I think the only thing we can do from here is keep an open mind. It's not wrong to stand up for what you believe in, but always consider the opposite side of the spectrum and the other perspective. One thing that is different from before, is our awareness and acknowledgement of the lies. Just like the San Lorenzans, we have chosen to believe in whatever we believe in despite the lies. Just as the book is never-ending, our illusions are also never-ending. In the end it is a never-ending cat's cradle with no cat and no cradle. 

Thoughts on Cat's Cradle

        After thoroughly discussing what Vonnegut implied in Cat’s Cradle,  I was stumped while trying to come up with a thesis statement so I started messing around on youtube and thought that it would be more productive to search this book and see what comes up. I watched a bunch of videos but none of them really stuck out, so I don’t have one to post a link to that would be worth anyone’s time.
However, it did help me remember how much the book really pokes fun at religion. To name a couple examples:  Newt watching the insects fight is reminiscent of God watching people without interference or obvious solution , and the Bokononist tradition of touching feet to gain happiness shows how illogical some aspects of religion can be.

       Reading this novel made me realize that for the duration of this course, I need to read the assigned material with an unbiased perspective on the subject matter. I’m a pretty religious person, and while reading Cat’s Cradle, I kept trying to find truth within Bokononism only because it was introduced as a religion. It made me somehow want to believe in the ideals it presented, or to at least try to understand why the characters in the book put so much faith in this made up religion of sorts. I also always tend to think that progress in science is typically best for the world as a whole, which is parallel to what Dr. Asa Breed mentioned at some point in the novel. I’ve tried to find the page number for like five minutes, but the character mentioned something along the lines of how scientists don’t create products with evil intentions. This is when Jonah was questioning whether ice-nine actually exists. This proves to be true in the novel because Feliz created ice-nine in order to help the army. I guess this can also be seen as an evil intention, depending on your thoughts about the morality behind war. What I’m basically saying is that I should have really taken the “foma” concept seriously, and accepted that the book was going to be a never-ending series of connected lies. It would have made Friday’s discussion a lot simpler.

       This has been a brain dump.

Beardsley & Vonnegut

After Friday's class, I could not stop thinking about an essay we read in my philosophy class by Monroe C. Beardsley, titled The Authority of the Text. The piece is a response and rebuttal of E.D. Hirsch's essay, In Defense of the Author, but that is neither here nor there for the moment. The essay comments on literary interpretation, and if we, the audience/critics, need to discover the authorial or textual meaning behind a text. Is the author necessary to form a true interpretation of a text? Towards the end of his piece, Beardsley says, "...they [readings] do not bring out of the work something that lies momentarily in it; they are rather ways of using the work to illustrate a pre-existent system of thought. Though they are sometimes called 'interpretations'...they merit a distinct label, like superimpositions." Some works are "superimpositions" of others. In Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, is the Book of Bokonon created by the pre-existing ideas of Jonah, or even, Vonnegut? Does Vonnegut matter? Beardsley would argue that neither Vonnegut, nor his background, are necessary to find meaning—"correct" meaning—in Cat's Cradle. Beardsley claims, “The proper task of the literary interpreter is to interpret textual meaning.” And I think Vonnegut would give an "amen" or a "vin-dit" to that statement. At the end of Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut laughs at the reader, as pointed out in the blog post Cat's Cradle: A mockery of the reader, for trying to find some complex, authorial, deep meaning behind his novel. Sometimes there is no hidden meaning? I'm an English/Philosophy student....I don't (can't) except this!

A Made-Up True Story

In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien delves into his personal interpretation of how to distinguish the truth, as it was experienced, from a list of hard facts. Throughout the course of the first 136 pages, and, if my recollection from junior year is correct, the entire book the author moves fluidly between what is fact and what is fiction, and yet seems to believe that all of it is the truth.

The example that I find the most clear is the story of the man O’Brien killed, combined with a description of Rat Kiley’s storytelling on page 101. Kiley “had a tendency to stop now and then, inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and personal opinion……[he] couldn't help it. He wanted to bracket the full range of meaning.” I think that O’Brien does not believe that simple facts can convey the real truth of a war story.

Here is the story of how Tim O’Brien killed a man, as simply as I can say it. An armed Vietnamese man came up the trail O’Brien was guarding, and our narrator killed him with a grenade.

This telling doesn’t give much room for us to empathize with just how it would have felt to truly experience it, does it?

In his telling of the story, O’Brien delves into a back story that, while perhaps not factually accurate, gives us more of an idea of how he truly felt during these events. There are swirling stories and ideas of this victim’s past based off of details from the scene, such as his small wrists inspiring O’Brien to believe he was bullied when he was younger. This humanizes the victim, and sheds light, to me at least, on the kind of guilt and other emotions that O’Brien may have felt during this occurrence. Is it all factual? Not necessarily. But is it a truer version of the events as O’Brien experienced them? I think so.

Cat's Cradle: A mockery of the reader

Vonnegut's power in Cat's Cradle comes from his ceremoniously detailed set-up of the plot along construction of so many different and unique characters that, when working together, make it very hard for the reader to remain detached and remember that what he is reading is firstly fictional and secondly nonsensical. It is as if the entire story is a game, but the reader is in fact one of the players, or in better words, the pawn: taken and directed throughout the interwoven story-lines of the book. Having played the string game of cats cradle, it seems to me as if the story actually echoes or mirrors the game in a way. In the game, one person may think that they are finally reaching the endpoint or goal of the pattern but a singular move can reverse the entire process back to where it was before. In this same way, the plotline of the story seems to continue to reverse and cycle back upon itself so that a conclusion is hard to be found. In this sense it was almost ironic that the ending was so final and drastic, as if Vonnegut was trying to laugh at me (as a reader) because of how much I struggled to comprehend the complexity and intricacy of the plot when, in the end, the ending was surprisingly obvious and the doom could never have been prevented, so therefore all of the thoughts were inherently inconsequential and pointless.  

Dynamic Tension

After friday's intriguing and eyeopening class, Professor Schwartz was able to really dissect and explain the open interpretation qualities of the "Cat's Cradle". Throughout the text, a repeating theme of "Dynamic tension" can be seen. One example is the tension between science and religion. Science is a way in which humans use in order to understand how the world works. By doing so, science uses concrete evidence and proof in order to explain how certain things work. On the other hand, there is religion. Religion is practically an illusion that is used in order to give hope to people about life. In the "Cat's Cradle", the islanders used this faith in order to give reason to their life. The islanders are led to believe in Bokonan, a made up religion that is made up of all lies. The religion itself states that everything within itself is a lie, which throws off readers. However, without this religion and something to believe in, the people would have no meaning to life. Another occurrence of "dynamic tension" can be seen when two people performed the act of Boko-maru. Professor Schwartz drew a picture of two feet's soles touching one another. This is another symbolism of two opposites, in Boko-maru, these two opposites are symbolized by man and woman. This reoccurring theme almost outlines our course title of Truth vs. Lies, a form of dynamic tension within itself.

The True Truth

This is my second time reading The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and it was with great anticipation that I reached the chapter titled Good Form. It’s been through the lens of this chapter that I have been reading and interpreting the works that we have been reading in this class so far. While obviously there were some details that I had forgotten since the first time I read the novel, the idea of a “story-truth” being truer than a “happening-truth” has been in my mind throughout the whole class. However, this knowledge has not been as helpful as I thought it might have been when I first read the syllabus and saw the book list. While I think I have some idea of what O’Brien is trying to express, in that events that never actually occurred can greater express the emotions and thoughts and situations than retelling the “happening-truth”, I find it hard to apply this message to our most previous reading, Cat’s Cradle. One of the main take-aways I had from Cat’s Cradle is that man tries to construct meaning from the reality around himself wherever possible, even if he has to lie to himself to do so. It seems as though The Things They Carried occurs in the opposite order, where meaning has already been felt or lost, and the surroundings themselves are what are being invented.

At one point O’Brien says that “Stories are for joining the past to the future… Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story” (36). Once again I find it difficult to reconcile this idea with the paradox presented in Cat’s Cradle, where in life there exists “the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it” (CC 284). It seems to me that Vonnegut views it as impossible to fully escape the realities of one’s situation through invented “stories”, while O’Brien sees it as impossible to ever fully capture the realities of one’s situation without these invented stories. Vonnegut seems to think that in the end reality is final and inescapable while O’Brien suggests that in the end all that survives is not the “truth” but rather stories.

Value in Lies

After reading Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle and physically playing cats cradle in class, I realized the extent  and frequency to which we believe in illusions in our everyday lives. In class, we discussed that everything is an illusion and if we can understand this while dealing with reality, we will be closer to the actual truth. What we think is always an illusion, but we also discussed that "meaninglessness" is also a form of meaning. The game of cat's cradle may not have a clear goal or winner, but people play the game for amusement and entertainment. Even though after playing a complete cycle of the game, you are aware of the next move or outcome, you often keep playing until someone messes up. This dynamic tension required to succeed in the game is really interesting and fun. Much like the fiction we just read, T.V. shows, movies often start with a variation of the statement, "What you are about to see is complete fiction." Despite this caution or warning statement, we chose to watch or read the untrue story because perhaps even an untrue story can possess some "truths" that we can learn. Although "foma" is not a real word, we often employ foma on a day-to-day basis. As stated in the pretext we certainly, "live by the foma that make [us] brave and kind and healthy and happy" (Vonnegut). We believe in lies that make us feel better. Sometimes we believe in lies hoping that they will become truths. Lies are not pointless. We shouldn't ignore lies because there can be important truths that come from them. This dynamic tension between lies and truths is very prevalent in the decisions we make and I am interested to see what other texts we read this semester will represent and explain this dynamic tension.

A Pro-Masculine Society

The novel, The Things They Carried, by Tim O’Brien appears to be a story about masculinity and social perception.  O’Brien writes in the first person and reveals his motives and emotions when he was drafted to fight in the Vietnam War.  O’Brien refuses to fight in a war he morally does not believe in and attempts to run away to Canada.  While on the run O’Brien stops at a lodge that is closing down for the winter.  This lodge is located along the shore of the Rainy River where Canada resides just across the river on the other shore.  The owner of the lodge, Elroy, understands O’Brien’s issues without actually asking and clarifying what his issues are.  Elroy brings O’Brien “fishing” on his boat and drives his watercraft within swimming distance of Canada as if he already knew O’Brien wanted to flee the country.  While stationed approximately twenty feet from the Canadian border O’Brien experiences moral strife and cannot decide whether to abandon his past and flee to Canada or to return home and take part in the war.  After much deliberation O’Brien ultimately decides to return home and go to war.  What was striking to me was that the only reason that he decided to do this was out of fear of being ridiculed and embarrassed.  He mentions numerous times of how he preferred that the regulars of the Gobbler Cafe not remember him for “how the damned sissy had taken off for Canada” (O’Brien 43).  O’Brien only returned to his American life because of his fear for being judged, or simply embarrassment.  The consistent attention to how society perceives O’Brien exhibits an overarching theme of masculinity.  O’Brien wants to be remembered as a manly man of honor and patriotism more than he wants to live his life his own way.  This ultimately boils down to his fear of being embarrassed for being perceived as a “pussy” by the society he lives in.

Things They Wanted

Why a war story?

“In war you lose your sense of the definite, hence your sense of truth itself, and therefore it’s safe to say that in a true war story nothing is ever absolutely true.” (O’ Brien, 78)

In one version of the Vietnamese history textbook, the one I was taught with, there was a story similar to that of the four soldiers and the grenade. Except that the hero was a Viet Minh during French Indochina War and he saved a platoon from losing an anti-aircraft cannon they were humping along the hills overlooking Dien Bien Phu valleys where the French positioned. He ran to where the cannon was, used his body like a wedge, and stopped the cannon from falling off the trail. He died, they said. I can’t remember what became of the cannon. I’d like to say it served its purpose afterwards but I can’t, cause there’s this part in me that’s afraid someone would fact-check me and call me out cause To Vinh Dien's story was as real as Curt Lemon's or Rat Kiley's. I can’t let myself be O’Brien, cause I’ve never been to war.

So what’s the moral?

O’Brien would tell us it’s all made-up, all these war stories of his (O’ Brien 81). He would tell us true war stories are true cause they suck us in like vapors and blur the line between ambiguity and certainty (78), that they don’t depend on any absolute truths (79-80). That’s war story’s moral. Mitchel Sanders, or shall I say O’Brien cause frankly Sanders could simply be a mouthpiece for all we know, [renounced]** his belief in sarcasm as a defensive mechanism against this heart of darkness and resorted to the haunting, living, breathing silence of the land derogatorily called Nam as the ultimate morality (13 vs.74). A kind of morality that subsumes generalizations of facts and feelings of any kind. A kind of morality that can only  be put on paper in streams of consciousness so that it can participate, but never explicitly says if it agrees or opposes, the literary tradition on war and humanity that started with Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now, Fullmetal Jacket and the likes. That’s what O’Brien character thinks of war in this O’Brien book; in the silence amidst the chaos, there’s this “aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference” (77). In this way he’s much like Felix Hoenikker the Father of the atom bomb. They don’t care what we do with ourselves after we get the stories from them, so long as we let them get at truth the way they’ve always done. They just want to see themselves in us, to see this big chunk of moral indifference that confuses us long after the fact. They want to affirm their influence in our silence. That’s their kind of morality. That’s the moral.

Now, not knowing what became of the artillery, I think it’s fair to elucidate on what happened of the story of Vinh Dien. Obviously the story became textbook classic. But kids knew about it even before they came across it again in the textbook. So you can say I was San Lorenzan until this day when I say I was.

**: (the assumption that the stories are put in chronological order is most likely to be wrong, so I put the verb in bracket)

Truth and Lies in The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried clearly contains a theme of blurred lines between falsehood and actuality, which is shown immediately within the first few pages. Jimmy Cross is a war lieutenant who is responsible for the particular group of soldiers but believes his fantasies of a girl named Martha have distracted him from performing up to his full potential and ultimately caused the death of lavender. O’Brien is already leaking fantasies and untruths into reality, causing real and tragic events in the story. Through these fantasies and stories, O’Brien is also commenting on life at war and the absolute necessity of relying on false stories for physical survival. The dynamic tension between truth and lies is already apparent in the novel and is also exemplified in the narrators’ metaphorical descriptions of the soldiers and the things they carried. Although the facts of what the men were actually carrying can be taken as truths, O’Brien doesn’t only mean to tell us mundane facts about the items in the men’s packs, he is expressing deeper meanings about the individuals that are shown through the objects. O’Brien is not technically lying to us but is telling us facts while he really wants the reader to pick up something deeper. It seems as though O’Brien has the tendency to hide complex ideas throughout tedious events, which can certainly be interpreted as another form of lies.