“They
plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat,
unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their
legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the
rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the
next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was
automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of
posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a
kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience
and hope and human sensibility” (O'Brien 15).
I
think one of the really cool things about this passage, and O'Brien's
writing as a whole is how his actual writing is able to communicate
so much to the reader. This passage here is just one sentence
connected by a lot of conjunctions and a lot of commas. At first the
commas set the pace of the passage, keeping the reader in check so
they too “plo[d] along slowly” and feel as if they are there with
the soldiers “toiling up the hills and down into the paddies”
(15). With each additional comma and each additional phrase, the
sentence builds on itself so that by the end of the sentence the
reader gets the same tired, dull, empty feeling that O'Brien is
describing. And just like O'Brien's discussion of the things each
soldier carried progressed from the tangible to the intangible, so
does this one sentence as it moves from describing the physicalities
of the warfront to the philosophical heart of war. In the second half
of the sentence O'Brien uses repetitive structures like “it was
automatic, it was anatomy” and “a kind of inertia, a kind of
emptiness” to make the reader feel exactly what his words are
describing: most of the time, war is dull and mechanical and all that
these soldiers want to do is to get through it, to get to the end of
the sentence (15). I think that part of the reason why O'Brien's novel is so powerful is because his writing actually transports the reader to the places he describes. Instead of having the reader be removed from the scene, O'Brien pulls them in and makes them buy into the reality of his fiction--in other words, he involves the reader just so he is able to manipulate them.
This is very well said. I also find intriguing the balance that O'Brien must strike between making the readers feel the war, it's inertia and it's purposelessness, and ensuring that we do not climb his stories like so many hills, humping without intellect, picking up nothing, feeling that there is nothing to gain.
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