Religious Intent

                 The argument that the religious leaders in both Cat’s Cradle and The Things They Carried seek to lead their followers to happiness and ease of mind has validity, however it may be argued that noble intent is overshadowed by a more selfish motivation in both novels. In The Things They Carried, the primary religious figure is defined in this argument as Henry Dobbins. Although Kiowa is more devoutly and outwardly religious, Dobbins actually considers leading organized religion. While he considers this, he states (in addition to remarks concerning visiting the ill and being kind to people) that he would enjoy a “Free house, free car. Lots of potlucks” (O’Brien 114). This may be viewed as a very selfish act as Dobbins expresses interest in the life of a minister to experience the benefits of the position rather than solely to help his congregation.

Concerning Cat’s Cradle in this argument, Bokonon is defined as the religious leader. The possibility that he is a construct is not addressed in this context as he is analyzed as an independent character. Bokonon and McCabe’s original reason for Bokonon going into hiding was to “give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang” (Vonnegut 173). This may be viewed as distastefully manipulative. Bokonon does not necessarily need to give the religion more excitement to keep the followers interested, but he chooses to do so possibly for the simple thrill of observing his followers fall into his trap, but does this act supersede Bokonon’s good intentions? Does Dobbins’ selfishness supersede his? 

Two Worlds Repel

In Cat’s Cradle, the scientific world (Ilium) in New York and the religious world (San Lorenzo) in the Caribbean are developed so physically far apart that we clearly understand how different these lifestyles are. The two ‘worlds’ never come together and never mix which indicates that those living by the ‘foma’ of lies in San Lorenzo and the others following the basis of science in Ilium do not see eye to eye. As Jonah makes his way from Ilium to San Lorenzo, he moves from a very methodological society where for every question there is a scientific answer to a society where all answers come from a belief in a higher power.

            In The Things They Carried, O’Brien also demonstrates the dissociation between war and peace by portraying the negative reactions of mixing home with battle. Not only does O’Brien revisit the field where Kiowa died, he also brings his daughter with him. He exposes her to the memories of fear, violence, and loss, which result in an unfavorable integration of the two worlds where Kathleen feels uncomfortable. Additionally, Tim has a hard time leaving the war stories outside of home. Every time the memories of war knock on his door, he lets them in. Kathleen says, “Some dumb thing happens a long time ago and you can’t ever forget it.” (pg175) . Tim also acknowledges his inability to leave the war behind when he says, “The bad stuff never stops happening: it lives in its own dimension, replaying itself over and over.” These ‘bad things’ that branched from the war are brought into Tim’s home and ‘contaminate’ the peaceful asylum that his home is supposed to be. When this happens, he knows that the sanity he is supposed to gain from being at home is taken away by the failure to detach the two ‘worlds’.

            Both O’Brien and Vonnegut created a situation in which their characters turn to a higher power or good luck charm as a support system. In Cat’s Cradle, the natives of San Lorenzo turn to Bokonon as a ‘God’, or the principles of Bokononism as means of guidance and strength. Similarly, in the war, the soldiers carried sentimental items that reminded them of home – gave them a reason to fight. In both of these worlds, the characters are able to believe, have faith, and look up to or fight for someone greater. Without these sentiments of love and strength, the soldiers would have less to carry but a greater burden, and the natives would be lost with no sign pointing them in the right direction.  

Both authors communicate the incompatibility of the two worlds to the readers but also clearly indicate that each environment has a unique effect on each character.

The Man Who Never Was

When Timmy takes Linda on their first date, it's to see a movie about a corpse. Specifically, about a corpse that was assigned a completely fabricated identity: "they dress him up in an officer's uniform, plant fake documents in his pockets, then dump him in the sea and let the currents wash him onto a Nazi beach" (O'Brien 220). The central emotion O'Brien associates with this movie is fear. Even with his eyes closed, he couldn't escape the splash of the body, and continued to see "how inert and heavy it was, how completely dead" (O'Brien 220). Throughout the novel, O'Brien always comes back to the idea that deadness is absolute. There aren't degrees or shades of death, and once someone is killed, it can't be undone. In many ways, I think it is the fear of this crushing realization that drives (both author and writer) O'Brien to tell stories. The author reanimates corpses through tales of their lives, saving them out of sheer necessity...but he does this for people who never existed in the first place. He is, in essence, recreating the movie that Timmy saw with Linda. Because writer O'Brien fears the splash of bodies and the disappearance of his friends, he fights to preserve them. Author O'Brien, on the other hand, uses The Man Who Never Was as a way to call attention to his storytelling. The characters are made up. They don't exist. They "never were." But he can preserve them regardless, because through his writing, he creates them, just as those men in the movie created a British soldier when they dumped a corpse into the sea. It is in this way that he fights off death.

Bringing Back the Dead

      O’Brien (once again the writer O’Brien) states that dead people have the ability to live in stories and dreams.  That makes me think that O’Brien is telling this story, so he can imagine all of his dead friends alive.  In these stories O’Brien is practically reliving these events because he misses his friends.  O’Brien does not know how to deal with the death of these people, so he writes about them to pretend that they aren't dead anymore.  Instead of dealing with death or trying to get over it, O’Brien is just trying to erase death all together.  He believes that putting people in stories makes them less dead, so he continues to put them in stories to make them not seem dead, but alive.  O’Brien started doing this with Linda at a very young age, but he used dreams not writing (I know he eventually switched to writing about Linda).  He still dreams about Linda because that is how he makes her feel alive.  In the last couple sentences of the book O’Brien wrote, “I can see Kiowa, too, and Ted Lavender and Curt Lemon, and sometimes I can even see Timmy skating with Linda under the yellow floodlights”.  This sentence shows that these people are coming back to him through not only imagination and memory, but writing.  The more O’Brien writes about them the greater his memory is of them and that allows him to not think about death.

O'Brein Carries Guilt

           O’Brien the writer (the O’Brien in the book) is clearly trying to tell the reader that soldiers have a lot of things to carry during the war.  These things range from actually war materials to emotions.  During our discussion in class we realized O’Brien is carrying a lot of guilt because he killed someone.  I then started to realize that O’Brien is trying to get rid of this guilt through telling the story to us.  The problem O’Brien is facing is the more he talks about the man he killed the more he thinks about it.  O’Brien starts thinking about the person this man was and the family he had before he was killed.  O’Brien is now making the load he has to carry even more because he keeps thinking about this man he killed.  It seems like O’Brien is in a never ending cycle of guilt.  No matter what he does he cannot get this man out of his head.  The reader then realizes the true pain of war and the psychological toll it has on the body.  Everyone can see the physical pain war has through the injuries, but it is hard to understand what goes on in a soldier’s head.  O’Brien has finally found a way to connect to the reader and show them the stress and baggage someone has, that is fighting in a war.  I believe that was one of O’Brien’s major goals in telling this story to us.

Epidemic

This story did not talk to me or inspire me. It did not draw me in. Maybe I’m used to other war stories. Maybe I don’t know enough about the Vietnam War. Maybe I’m sick of war stories.

I struggled with finding a subject to write about this week, but, one excerpt did echo in my head. An excerpt about war.

 “It was my view then, and still is, that you don’t make war without knowing why. Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.”¹

I have never been to war, but there has never been peace in my country and I grew up surrounded by voices of war and an abundance of war stories. This excerpt caught my attention not only because of where I grew up and the daily “war threat” issues I experience/d, but also due to one of the latest global discussions: whether the powerful nations of the world should intervene in Syria. I do not mean to involve politics, but rather to illustrate how this book, and specifically this excerpt, from 1990, is even more relevant than when it was written.

I think that here, as in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, O’Brien is trying to teach us, to humor us, about a global “truth”. I believe they (both O’Briens) talk about war, not as a metaphor, but as a constant in human life that cannot be ignored.  If war cannot be ignored, can we even make a knowledgeable decision about it? Is war something that we choose or is it something that chooses us, like an illness? Can we be immunized against war? How can you define justice, a just cause, or even understand these principles, when the way in which the war will end is unclear? How did the US define its goal for the unexecuted operation to disarm Syria of its chemical weapons? Why not try to end the civilian war altogether? Whether its chemical weapons or artillery, people still die and “you can’t make them undead.”² How can we define what is a humane way of being killed? And how does the world determine if the consequences are worth the cause? These are the questions I carry.

¹The Things They Carried, O’Brien, pages 38-39

²The Things They Carried, O’Brien, page 39

*Thank you Burke and John for reviewing my post, and my dad for helping me develop my line of thought.

No Damn Cat, No Damn Cradle

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.”

How Does That Make You Feel?

Generally, when I think back to war stories I have heard, they involve heroics, valiant deeds, or triumph over evil. There may be some temporary hardship endured and some heavy inconveniences, but the war brings out the "inner man" in you, makes you "tough", or ultimately serves some time honored cliche about the benefits of surviving and living through a war.  How does a reader feel after hearing one of these stories?  Awe, respect for the individuals involved, and so on.

By contrast, these stories that O'Brien presents have no clear-cut moral.  There is no heartwarming feeling at the end.  There's an interesting layer of irony here. From what I can tell so far from reading in the book, O'Brien's stories are substantially fiction based.  And yet, his stories ring truer to the human experience in a war zone larger than a lot of the other "true" war stories (mentioned in the first paragraph) that get passed around.  The portion of the story where the narrator (presumably O'Brien) laments his situation of getting thrown into the Vietnam War is much more relevant, hard-hitting, and touching to the average reader than any stories I've heard involving killing mass amounts of enemy soldiers.  O'Brien's stories, while not factually correct, inundate us heavily and effectively with O'Brien's view on the war - a depressing, heavy experience.  Likewise, this is exactly how the reader feels after reading it - very cynical and upset.  And the book makes this point in its transparent way of fabricated stories that can really bother a reader for that irony.

The Man I Killed

"His jaw was in his throat, his upper lip and teeth were gone, his one eye was shut, his other eye was a star-shaped hole, his eyebrows were thin and arched like a woman's, his nose was undamaged, there was a slight tear at the lobe of one ear, his clean black hair was swept upward into a cowlick at the rear of the skull, his forehead was lightly freckled, his fingernails were clean, the skin at his left cheek was peeled back in three ragged strips, his right cheek was smooth and hairless, there was a butterfly on his chin, his neck was open to the spinal cord and the blood there was thick and shiny and it was this wound that had killed him" (O'Brien 118).

This passage along with this entire chapter was very disturbingly moving to me. Although this novel is classified as fiction and we know that most of the stories are untrue, I still find myself questioning almost all of the anecdotes, debating whether or not they actually happened. What was so powerful in this chapter was O'Brien's technique of repetition. On almost every page from 118 to 124 he repeated one of the deceased man's wounds. I think this technique was extremely potent because it forced us to visualize the image of the dead man. The man O’Brien killed.  We knew from the first paragraph what the victim looked like. By reinforcing the vivid image in the readers mind the readers were subject to sympathize with O’Brien. The fact that he recreated the situation and kept repeating the magnitude of the wounds, it made it seem like we were there too.

The way O’Brien reacted to the situation was also very emotive because he made it seem so real and tangible. Staring at the corpse, restating the various wounds and injuries that ceased the “innocent” man’s life, burying himself with grief and regret. As a reader I sympathized with O’Brien. I wanted the dead man to still be alive and I wanted O’Brien to be stable instead of sad. However, even though I wanted the dead man to be alive and O’Brien to be happy, I also kind of wanted the story to be true, because it was so powerful and so heavy that it seems like it almost would have been too good and too tragic for it to not be true. This brings me back to the point that “most of the events in this novel are not true.” If this anecdote didn’t actually happen would the readers still feel in distress? Am I the only reader that questions the validity of these anecdotes despite the message at the beginning of the (fictional) novel? And lastly…does it matter? 

Reading for Truth in "On the Rainy River"

Though our class discussion on Tuesday about academic preconceptions had seemingly nothing to do with “The Things They Carried,” it really got me thinking about the chapter “On the Rainy River.” Though the chapter as a whole may not be true, O’brien’s circumstances prior to being drafted were: he did go to Macalester, and he did end up doing graduate studies at Harvard after the war. Macalester is an elite institution similar to Hamilton, and O’brien had many of the same preconceptions that Hamilton students hold about liberalism and the importance of academia. As he puts it, the entirety of his war experience prior to being drafted was “almost entirely an intellectual activity” (39). O’brien, of course, did not expect to drafted, and the chapter boils down to his one basic question about his circumstances: why me?

            “On the Rain River” is perfect exemplification of O’brien’s point in the book as a whole because he tries to get the reader to feel exactly what he felt upon being drafted through a lie. The circumstances of the story are truthful, but we cannot be sure of the existence of the Tip Top Lodge, or if O’brien ever drove north towards Canada at all. We as readers must therefore search for what is important rather than what is true. Canada was easily accessible to him, and whether he drove north or not, he did certainly feel the social pressure of his entire town bearing down on him. This pressure was very real to O’brien, both at the time when he was drafted and when he wrote the book. The story about the boat and the lodge and Elroy just sets the stage for the final passage when he finally caves in and goes to war. He may not have even shed a tear, but it demonstrates how he felt about the situation: “I was a coward. I went to war” (58).

The Children's Crusade

The image of children fighting the Vietnam War is heavily emphasized throughout The Things They Carried. O’Brien recalls “The average age in our platoon, I’d guess, was nineteen or twenty...there was a childlike exuberance to it all, lots of pranks and horseplay. Like when Azar blew away Ted Lavender’s puppy. ‘What’s everybody so upset about?’ Azar said. ‘I mean, Christ, I’m just a boy.’” (pg. 35) This short excerpt is one of the most poignant illustrations of the fact that the soldiers were mere children. Azar, with childlike innocence cries out for forgiveness on the grounds that he didn't know any better due to his age. The most disturbing thought is that this boy, and others like him, were sent out to war with weapons and orders to kill but lacked the simple maturity of judgment to keep from killing a beloved pet. Another haunting example of childhood on the warfront is Henry Dobbins and his security blanket stockings. The stockings seem for a while to simply be an odd lucky charm from his girl, but it becomes clear that they are much more when Dobbins is said to have “slept with the stockings up against his face, the way an infant sleeps with a flannel blanket” (pg. 111). This shows Dobbins’ lack of emotional maturity as he is unable to face the war without the coping mechanism of his ‘blanket.’

                In neither of these instances was a human life lost or endangered by immaturity, but, with the case of Curt Lemon, the reader learns that childishness can in fact lead death. Curt and Rat were playing a game in the jungle when Curt stepped in a booby trap and was killed. “They didn't understand about the spookiness. They were kids; they just didn't know.” (pg. 66) With childlike naivete and adolescent fearlessness, the two boys never thought that their play might lead to consequence although they lived in a world of violence. The fact that the boys were so young, then, actually allowed them to take risks that older more calculated and developed thinkers would have known better than to take. By this thinking, is it critical that wars be fought with such uninhibited young men? Is this an exploitation of our youth? Definitely. But as long as there have been wars, there have been boy soldiers, and this will sadly continue.

How To Tell A Better War Story

You can tell a story a million times and never get it right. How many of us do that--change the wording, or the facts, just a little bit, when we're telling our friends stories, just to make it funnier or more profound? Often what makes a story great isn't what happens, it's how the story is told. I know that as i repeat a story, I get better at telling it, more confident in what I'm saying, more sure that is the right way to go about it. And it often pays off -- the last time I tell a story is usually far superior to the first try. That's why we rewrite essays, isn't it? Because with every edit, the story gets better, your points get clearer. This principle holds true for both the characters in The Things They Carried and O'Brien as a novelist.

We see when it Sanders tries to tell the story about the mountain music to Tim, and isn't satisfied with the first tale. He's frustrated with "not quite getting the details right, not quite pinning down the final and definitive truth" (72). That's why he can't let it go -- he has to go up to Tim later and elaborate, tell him what the moral of the story is. Rat Kiley deals with the same issue when he's telling the story of Mary Anne -- his audience gets fed up with the story because of the way he tells it, Sanders advising him to "get a consistent sound" (102). Maybe then they'd believe him.

O'Brien the novelist struggles with the correct way to tell a story as well; that's why we see so much repetition throughout the book. He keeps writing about the war, each time trying to get it a little more right, in an attempt to get his readers to see the whole truth--of war, of peace, of hate, of love, of life. The Things They Carried is a composite of short stories, most of which have been published in different forms, and in packaging them together, O'Brien is tweaking the entire story just a little bit. Even though the individual stories themselves have all been previously relayed, O'Brien tells them differently every time, in order to arrive at the truth -- not the truth of what really happened, but the truth of what he and other soldiers felt during the Vietnam War. He wants us to feel what he felt, like on the river when he asks the reader to imagine that "You're twenty-one years old, you're scared, and there's a hard squeezing pressure in your chest" (54). And later, when he tells the story of Curt Lemon and Rat Kiley and the baby buffalo, when the woman doesn't understand what he meant. The story has failed him. He hasn't told it right; she doesn't get it. So he repeats it, because "all you can do is tell it one more time, patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real truth… you can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it" (81). Someday someone will understand what he's trying to say about war, and until then, the repetition is necessary.

Proximate Writing Reveals What Your Ultimate Writing is Revealing ... (Think About It) ...

Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried" is by far one of the most uniquely written books I have read in while. It is unique in that it is a work of fiction that we know to be "untrue," and yet we are so sucked in that after every anecdote I have to take a step back and remind myself that this is just very clever authorship. By evoking emotion in the reader and using other various techniques we feel that this work is "real"in some senses, and are able to extrapolate meaning from the fictional stories of the fictional novel.

O'Brien uses the technique of writing himself into the novel (let the meta-textuality begin) as a clever manipulation tool in which he elicits pathos, and as a result we believe him. Additionally he uses the discreet, yet what I find to be very interesting and telling, technique of putting a bit of himself in every character. Meaning, the character's fictional dialogues and stories reveal something inherently "true" about the greater book itself. For example, when discussing Rat's story telling habits are described as "he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt,"(O'Brien, 85). Hmm... kind of reminds me of what O'Brien is doing to his audience. Furthermore, "whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, and inserting little clarifications or bits of analysis and person opinion,"(O'Brien, 101). Really O'Brien!? Because that is how I feel about your writing too. Switch Rat's name for O'Brien and that is a perfect description of this book's set-up. His characters and these stories within his story (the proximate) are commentating and depicting the ultimate story and truth. Is this still considered meta-textual? Because I'm more confused. Yet it is what makes the story clever, addicting, and manipulative; and I am seeing a lot of parallels with Vonnegut... Book's Of Bokonon anyone?

Certain Obligations

"Jesus Christ, it's against the rules....I mean, you got certain obligations" (O'Brien 107). This is Mitchell Sanders's reaction to the end of Rat Kiley's story. Or rather, the lack of an end.  Like most every reader, Sanders has expectations as to where the story is going and the checkpoints it has to meet while getting there. After all, it's "against human nature" (107) to leave a story unfinished! Consistent pacing, a suspenseful plot, a resolution--these are all things readers indignantly crave. Tell it right or don't tell it at all.

Rat Kiley, obviously, doesn't care about any authorial obligations. He interrupts his own story with "half-baked commentary" (101) and is said to have a "compulsion to rev up the facts" (85). But this is Rat's way of telling the truth. The exaggeration isn't meant to deceive. Instead, it's supposed to make you feel what happened. "For Rat Kiley...facts were formed by sensation, not the other way around" (85). Sifting out the shards of fact shouldn't matter because the raw emotion of the story is where the whole truth lies.

In the larger context of this book, Rat and Mitchell's conversation represents O'Brien's relationship with his audience. He is Rat, trying to show us that a war story can be true even if it never happened, disregarding his so-called obligations as keeper of the tale.  There is no baby buffalo or Mitchell Sanders or Rat Kiley, and O'Brien says that every time he tells the story there is someone who can't see that. We expect to derive truth from facts, just as we expect every story to have an end. That just simply isn't always the case.

"She's already gone (107)."

        Contrary to widespread accounts of war as a unifying force, the supreme constructor of brotherhood and co-sacrifice, O'Brien conflates intimacy with war and utter individualism.
        Mary Anne enters Vietnam through and with Mark Fossie. She is apart from the war, physically and spiritually, until Fossie flies her in. She lands in country with concern for other people's opinions of her. Mary Anne does everything with Mark, her actions primarily trained towards the betterment and perpetuation of their relationship. She is effervescent and social, even flirtatious with the other soldiers, embodying a personality she feels will win their favor.
        Once Mary Anne claims Vietnam, using the Green Berets' raids to experience and embrace the heart of the war, she appears to Rat Kiley as completely self-directed. Mary Anne describes her intimacy with the war in a "voice slow and impassive. She was not trying to persuade (106)," she asserts, "You just don't know... Sometimes I want to eat this place. The whole country -the dirt, the death- I just want to swallow it and have it there inside me...  I feel close to my own body, I can feel my blood moving, my skin and fingernails, everything, it's like I'm full of electricity and I'm glowing in the dark -I'm on fire almost -I'm burning away into nothing -but it doesn't matter because I know exactly who I am. You can't feel that anywhere else (106)." Mary Anne is not trying to convince Mark Fossie, because she doesn't care whether he is convinced. Through becoming herself completely, feeling exactly what she is, and knowing exactly who she is, she becomes the war. She is content to burn away to nothing and to consume the war and have it BE her, because the war has given her complete self-understanding, and therein utter satisfaction. War strips away all of Mary Anne's affectations and extra-personal concerns, presumably imposed on her by the American culture she left behind, and what is left underneath is war itself. Is O'Brien suggesting that at least certain people have war in their hearts, kept down by social constructs? Or is he claiming that the sublime self-discovery of war can engender such reverence that one might choose to identify with war?
        In either case, or in some synthesis of the two, O'Brien makes clear that a person filled with war is fundamentally singular. "In part it was her eyes: utterly flat and indifferent. There was no emotion in her stare, no sense of the person behind it. But the grotesque part, he said, was her jewelry. At the girl's throat was a necklace of human tongues... Just for a moment the girl looked to Mark Fossie with something close to contempt (105)." Mary Anne is unaffected by the censure or anguish of the man she once loved. Her eyes, generally held as a window to the soul, display no person within. Either swallowing war has de-humanized Mary Anne, or it has eradicated the interface between her self and other people, rendering her perfectly self-possessed. Mary Anne's apathy towards others is epitomized by her necklace of tongues. I assume from the necklace that Mary Anne has killed people. The fact that she is wearing the necklace entails that she is owning in the intra-personal realm the value of killing and irreverence for life. Lastly, the fact that the necklace is composed of tongues suggests that Mary Anne has no regard for what other people have to say. Therefore, after being seduced by war, and consequently becoming war, Mary Anne reaches a point of ultimate singularity.
       O'Brien comments on Mary Anne's singularity through Rat Kiley's third-hand completion of the tale. The Green Beret's claim that despite her disappearance, "Mary Anne was still somewhere out there in the dark (110)." "Late at night... they almost saw her sliding through the shadows... She was dangerous. She was ready for the kill (110)." Mary Anne becomes the ambiguous fear in the night. She becomes the constant chance of death. By sacrificing her regard for other people, Mary Anne loses her personhood. She literally becomes an element of war in general.

The Terrible Awe

O’Brien starts the novel by listing tangible objects the soldiers carried—from guns and helmets to letters and drugs, all of which are tangible items that they need to “hump.”  O’Brien’s choice to almost monotonously list every item makes the reader feel weighed down as well.  He then progresses into the abstract ideas and thoughts that weigh on the men.  By describing intangible ideas like worry, love, embarrassment, pride, etc. as objects to be “carried,” the reader suddenly associates them with actual weight, making them seem that much heavier. 

O’Brien says the soldiers “carried all they could bear, and then some, including a silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried” (7).  A few pages later he continues by saying that among all the unknowns of war, “there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry”(15).  From these quotes I gather that the weight we carry is the weight of our lives.  The more we live, the more we add to our load, a load that becomes inescapable.  There is something horribly daunting about this ever-growing weight we can’t avoid.  We can’t lessen it, but we can decide how to balance it.  We can pick and choose what weighs us down.  In answering the question what am I reading for in this text?  I am reading to find out how these characters, who have seen and endured so much, cope with their loads—how they choose to handle the things they carry.