Gestalt & Gestell

Form and frame are inextricably intertwined in narrative: one creates the body of the work, the other, the context through which the work is viewed. In both Cat's Cradle and The Things They Carried, the auhtors use a particular kind of form and frame to create tension and narrative unity, and to draw one's awareness to the extent to which our acceptance of experiential truth over factual reality can be manipulated. Gestalt refers to form that is generated holistically from the entirety of its component pieces as organized by the brain. There is a tension there between the parts, between the "natural counterpoints" that O'Brien refers to in the chapter 'Notes' (153). We can define a literary entity like the Vietnam War not by the war itself, but by the parts and the way they are held in place by their "natural counterparts." Someone, I believe it was Chris, mentioned in class the analogy of a puzzle that is filled in starting from the borders. O'Brien and Vonnegut both fill in their stories from the borders through various devices like repetition and an a-chronological narrative style. In The Things They Carried, O'Brien often reaches back into his memories to pull together details and construct people or events that he draws on and repeats thematically throughout the text. For example, the phrase "his eye was a star-shaped hole" is used repeatedly to fill in the identity that is missing from the faceless, morally ambiguous war. It is also telling that O'Brien chose to tie the man's identity to the "star-shaped hole" because it illustrates the principle of Gestalt that things are formed by the parts of that form. In this case, the missing eye is defined by the borders of the hole. In Cat's Cradle, the object of the cat's cradle also illustrates Gestalt because it is defined by the negative spaces between the strings as organized by the ind into a cohesive whole. In reality, there's "No damn cat, no damn cradle" but by holding those strings, those component pieces, in tension, the illusion emerges. Gestell comes from the principle of framing, that everything must be framed or contextualized before it can be understood. We need a lense to look through. O'Brien and Vonnegut both provide somewhat convoluted and confusing lenses through which we can examine their work because they both use metatextual elements and there is no clear delineation between the roles of author, writer, narrator, and character at points. However, this only serves to make us more aware of the fact that our experience of the truth is just that- experiential. A distance is thus created and we are drawn out of the story and made to realize that we are, in fact, reading a piece of fiction. This is not reality as it happened; rather, it is truth as it was experienced by those who lived it, and now, by us.