Circles

The two minor characters Norman Bowker in Things They Carried and Newt Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle show how traumatic experiences can inhibit one’s ability to move forward. Both of these characters dwelling on several keys events in their lives and seem to move in circles instead of progressing forward and moving on. Norman Bowker plays a mostly minor role in the war stories, but is focused on in “Speaking of Courage” and “Notes,” which portray Tim’s telling of Bowker’s struggle to cope with his experience in Vietnam upon returning home. Bowker struggles with the town feeling “remote somehow” and reflects on times when “there had been no war” as he drives in circles around the lake of his hometown (O’Brien, 133; 132). Bowker is caught between the innocent memories of his hometown before the war and his traumatized self post-war. The struggles that Bowker faces are the very similar to Tim the writer. However, unlike Bowker, Tim copes with his confusion by writing. Similarly to how Bowker imagines a long conversation with his dad, Tim reaches out to the reader by writing down his stories from war because he is unable to move past his memories from Vietnam any other way. Similarly, Newt Hoenikker in Cat’s Cradle seems to be stuck moving in a circle around his own dysfunctional relationship with his father. Newt makes it clear that his main memory from the day the atomic bomb dropped was how terrifying his father was as he attempted to play cat’s cradle with him. He says, “So close up, my father was the ugliest things I had ever seen. I dream about it all the time” (Vonnegut, 12). Newt never seems to recover from this dramatic event in his childhood. When he later explains the absurdity of the game to the narrator, it becomes clear that Newt is unable to move on from his relationship with his father even after his death. These minor characters show how repetition of memories dreams create an internal tension that directly impacts their ability to cope with their present.