Blurred Lines

Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried complement each other—one’s mechanisms for manipulation serve as a supplement to the other’s. Through Vonnegut’s insertion of the game cat’s cradle into his novel, and through O’Brien’s invention of stories as a construct for the Vietnam War, the authors help their readers grasp the benefits of “pretending to understand” in order to achieve a satisfying reality. Additionally, both authors employ metaphors for their textual subject matter and the fiction genre.

             The religion of Bokononism in Vonnegut’s novel acts as a platform for his emphasis on not over-thinking. The Bokononists on San Lorenzo live the only reality they know without questioning it, and are consistently contented. The principles by which they conduct themselves and the principles by which their world is run may seem like blatant lies, but they accept them as truths for their own benefit. Vonnegut makes clear that the search for the precise line between truth and lies, between fact and fiction, is futile because the line so often gets blurred; everything is inherently filled with “untruths,” and at the end of the search there is always, in Newt Hoenikker’s words about the children’s game, “No damn cat, and no damn cradle” (166). Thus, pretending is key—when reading fiction, just as when wrapping string around fingers to create a “cat’s cradle,” suspension of disbelief is a requirement.

            Similarly, Tim O’Brien’s writing stresses the trivialness of factual accuracy. He sends the message to the reader that it is impossible to seek out the truth, when meanwhile he is getting trapped and doing exactly that, which proves the message’s validity. The author shows his need to talk; he is continuously adding details to the stories in the text and getting more specific, he creates characters upon characters with intricate backgrounds, he creates himself as a narrator—all going to show how difficult it is for him to understand it, and how ultimately, he never will understand it. Consequently, pretending is the only way for Tim O’Brien, the author, to come to terms with his storytelling, to be satisfied. He fakes that the novel is about the Vietnam War, while Tim the narrator says candidly, “And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about war” (81). The author uses war to represent the creation of life that was once lost to him, through fiction. The reader is made aware that fiction itself is only a conceptual idea, not necessarily based on evidence; O’Brien demonstrates, nonetheless, that the reader must allow himself or herself to get caught up in the fiction in order to acquire greater knowledge. 

The Walking Dead

            While Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is considered a novel about the Vietnam War, its story most resonant in my mind is not one of battle, but of childhood love and loss. In the novel’s final chapter, “The Lives of the Dead,” O’Brien inserts into his collection of war stories a seemingly random account of nine-year-old Timmy's infatuation with a classmate named Linda, who died of cancer just months after their innocent love sparked. Ostensibly unrelated, this story serves to emphasize the purpose of O’Brien’s metatextual commentary – to comment on the act of storytelling and the necessity of manipulation to truly tell a story in the most dynamic way – more effectively, in my opinion, than any of the novel’s individual war stories. At the time of his writing of this story, Linda was long deceased – but in this chapter, O’Brien suggests that in act of writing, he can bring her back to life: “In a story I can steal her soul. I can revive, at least briefly, that which is absolute and unchanging. In a story, miracles can happen” (224). The purpose of this chapter, it seems, is to settle the truth-versus-lies debate that permeates the entire novel once and for all. In implying that the purpose of storytelling is to bring life to the lifeless, O’Brien refutes the notion that truth has any importance. He himself admits that he has manipulated his anecdote to represent the image of Linda in his memory, not the image of Linda in reality, but this illusory manipulation creates, he claims, an even more vivid image of aliveness: “The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in your head. There is the illusion of aliveness” (218). Evidently, this ostensibly unrelated anecdote of bringing his dead childhood love back to life turns out to be crucial in summing up a main point of contest in the entire novel – the purpose of storytelling and the necessity of lies within it – abundantly clear: if a story’s true power is to bring a three-dimensional sense of life through two-dimensional words on a page, a certain level of manipulation is not merely welcome, but required.

Lies and Prions

When talking about Cat’s Cradle and The Things They Carried, it’s easy to get caught up in a discussion of what’s real and what’s not. I don’t think it really matters. Vonnegut and O’Brien are using stories, true, false, doesn’t matter, to simply help the reader understand their world and thoughts. O’Brien doesn’t outright say what Vietnam was, and he couldn’t if he tried. But he can tell stories to show what it was, and use that to understand life. It’s just a matter of framing. Vonnegut doesn’t say – hey science is this way – but he weaves stories to put into a fresh perspective, to help us incorporate how he feels about it into our pattern of thinking.

You could try to make Cat’s Cradle into a point for point analogy  Europe WWII or something like that; you could try to ground all of the outrageous ideas Vonnegut has to real world examples; but in the process you would lose sight of the fact that Vonnegut didn’t sit down and write a book called Why Life is Meaningless. He wrote one called Cat’s Cradle and it’s made of many complex, intertwining threads, just like the cradle. Story telling is not about simple truths, or simple lies.If you get up from either one of these books thinking – Wow, Vietnam was hell, or wow, religion is stupid – you’ve missed the point. “In the end there’s nothing to say about a true war story, except maybe, ‘Oh’”(O'Brien 74).

On an unrelated note, I found the real life equivalent of ice-nine: prions, the misfolded proteins that cause mad cow disease, chronic wasting disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. These are proteins that have been twisted (sometimes by a genetic mutation) into a self replicating form. Just like ice-nine, whenever they touch another similar protein, they provide a template for the new protein to conform to, and they keep replicating in this pattern exponentially. Like ice-nine, they are massively destructive. Once a person shows symptoms of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, they usually die within six months. This is the human version of the Cat's Cradle apocalypse, caused by the stacking crystals of ice-nine. Like an ice-nine apocalypse, a prion infection is irreversible.
More similarities: Ice-nine is more solid and stable than normal ice or water,and in prions, the misfolded version of the protein is also more stable than the normal protein and can resist heat that would denature the original protein. This means that cooked meat can still contain prions.
One minor difference: Prions are real.
Scary shit, huh?

So Alive

Tim O'Brien as narrator states beautifully, "and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a fire-fight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil-- everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble." (O'Brien, pg. 77).
This passage, along with many others in the novel, made me smile. I have nothing even remotely close to war to compare this sensation to, but the experience that immediately came into my head was the first couple hours after a stomach bug. All of a sudden everything around you seems wonderful-- jokes seem funnier, people seem more lovable, nature seems more beautiful. You wonder how come you don't revel in this paradise every second. I think that O'Brien (the writer, but also presumably the author) and his fellow soldiers' show amazing strength of character in their ability to experience such joy in a combat zone. It takes courage, a different kind of courage than we are used to, to recognize pain but not always fight to escape it, just recognize it's existence. In my religious studies class year we learned about this form of internal peace: we do not have to be happy every second in order to lead a happy, meaningful life. O'Brien experienced his own kind of meditation in the middle of violence and chaos; he preserved the innate beauty of living that is here for us to take or leave, but will not be forced upon us. As O'Brien describes, coming so close to death made him feel that much more alive. Although most of us will hopefully not have to find joy in a combat zone, I do think that O'Brien, in his "war story that's not a war story" was certainly telling a story that we can all remember when we are just having one of those bad, bad days.

Reclaiming the Ability to Feel

While Tim O’Brien, the author, uses the novel to explore the art of storytelling and manipulation of the reader, Tim O’Brien the narrator and solider uses the collection of stories in a much different way. The character of Tim O’Brien, as he is created in the novel, uses the stories to bring feeling back into his life, to reclaim his pre-Vietnam self. Tim states that telling such stories enabled him “to make myself feel again” (172). As we know, war is difficult, it is brutal and damaging both mentally and physically. The soldiers become numb to the pain, and lose feeling altogether in order to save themselves from pain. O’Brien must tell stories to bring himself back to all the emotions that were damaged in war. The characters who die in his stories, including Ted, Kiowa, and Linda, all represent a lost sense in Tim and their presence serves as a way to reclaim these emotions. Ted represents the feeling of fear while Kiowa represents the deep faith in religion, both of which Tim loses somewhere in the war. Although not from his time in the war, Tim uses Linda to help explain the concept of death while also bringing up the importance of his innocence. Tim’s ability to “save Timmy’s life through a story” is contrary to Baulkner, who fails to make himself feel again. After he returns from Vietnam, he is lost, on the outside, and never able to restore himself. His suicide exhibits his complete numbness to life.  Without the tool of storytelling, Baulkner can only travel around in circles instead of finding the path back to the dynamic expression of feeling that constitutes fully living. 

REAL

                A real story is not about facts, it is not based on if it was true or not. What makes, a real story are the human emotions and the interaction shared between groups of people. Tim O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried is real because all the stories create the human aspect that is the core of life. Tim O’Brien says true war stories have no morals or any emotions to it. This may be true however; lies do not dilute how real the story actually is. His stories leave a stigma in the hearts of the reader; this action makes all the stories told real. Humans lie, they tell the truth, regardless of this their existence in the world is still real. It is the concept that these stories tell lies and at the same time tell a truth that makes them human. They are created from the hearts and minds of individuals and become real because readers believe they are. O’Brien believes if the story didn't actually happen then it cannot be real. However what is real simply transcends all aspects of what is fiction, and relies on what people think. A real story gives all the power to the person perceiving it and gives them the power to decide if the story is true or not. In world of the novel what is true is or little importance only thing that seems to matter is the story able to persuade the reader to believe it is real. If the story is able to that then it becomes real.

Facts about the Truth

In class I feel that the terms fact and truth have been used very loosely and are thought to be the same thing. I feel that facts and truths each have their own purposes but are quite different. One model that greatly differentiates fact from truth is the use of a lie detector. If the person hooked up to the detector sincerely believes that what they say is true then the detector will interpret it so. In my essay I try to describe how the characters in Cat’s Cradle and The Things They Carried use their interpretations of truth to create a reality that best fits their needs. One aspect in many people’s lives that can be a truth to some but not others is religion. It doesn’t matter if some people do not believe in your religion, if you have any at all. All that matters is you believe it to be true and that it plays a role in your life that you deem important. The backbone of religion, more often then not, is not facts but rather faith. Now this relates to the books we have read because from someone on the outside looking in at the Bokonon religion it would appear like a bunch of lies and to be fake all together. However for the people of San Lorenzo this religion brings them happiness and is without a doubt a truth in their lives. My essay also tries to answer a question within itself that I will present to the blog. What is at stake in recognizing facts versus the truth? 

"Did that really happen?"

If O’Brien is to be believed, the effects of Vietnam on the mind could almost be likened to the all-pervading grip of ice-nine. After being exposed to a seed, you’re enveloped in the dangerous, often fatal grip of Vietnam. If you do survive, you live in a post-exposure world, one in which you view everything through a different lens, one that alternately sharpens and obfuscates the images you’re presented with. Perhaps after witnessing unspeakable atrocities in the jungles, paddies, and villages of Vietnam, you might find the most mundane of things divine in their simplistic, life-affirming beauty. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you might wind up like Norman Bowker, going in circles, silently gasping for help until one day, death, the very thing you tried so hard to avoid in Vietnam, looks friendly compared to the pain of continued existence.

I’m reminded of Mona’s suicide amongst the frigid effigies of her fellow San Lorenzans when I think of Bowker hanging himself. He must have felt an inversion of this imagery, he being frozen, stuck, everyone else surging forward at unprecedented speeds, much too quickly for him at least. The sections of The Things They Carried devoted to Bowker are in my opinion, the most poignant. Whereas Tim and the others who made it out alive found a way to vent their sorrows, Norman Bowker sat in an echo chamber, the worst moments from his time spent in Vietnam projected onto one of its bare walls. Norman Bowker sat there, watching Kiowa get sucked into the shit field over and over, watching Ted Lavender fall—“Boom-down,”—“Like cement,” (6) before eventually deciding to hang himself with a jump rope at the YMCA. Now, let me ask you a question. Who gives a fuck if it’s real or not?

Lies Create Emotions

The stories that O’Brien tells in The Things They Carried become part of his own history because they reflect his emotions in regard to difficult incidents that occurred. The novel represents “story truth” (179), according to O’Brien’s memory because recollections are always colored and flawed. The hybridization of truth and fiction make the existence of a younger Tim possible, from before the war. The stories also function as an outlet for his feeling about the tragedies that he encountered.

The events in O’Brien’s life are burdensome, making it necessary for him to create a narrative to cope with the real events around him. O’Brien explains that when someone dies, either a fellow soldier or enemy, the men pretend that the body is “not really a body […] its easier to cope with a kicked bucket than a corpse” (238). Similarly, the soldiers pretend a dead body is not a body in order to cope with the traumas of war, as O’Brien is uses the novel as a coping mechanism. By repeating and rewriting his ideas throughout the text, he is able to fully comprehend them himself. 

The stories that O’Brien invented save his younger, innocent self. During the draft for the Vietnam War, men between the ages of eighteen and twenty were primarily those going off to battle. It is difficult to consider an eighteen-year-old boy a man, which is exactly the message O’Brien is trying to convey. The narrator explains that the soldiers felt like children in Vietnam, by Azar stating, “Christ, I’m just a boy” (37). By writing The Things They Carried, O’Brien is “[realizing] it is Tim trying to save Timmy’s life with a story” (246). The stories permit Timmy to survive since he was very immature when he first went to war. O’Brien is using his novel to explain to the reader that stories save people’s lives.  Not only do O’Brien’s stories help him cope with his trauma, they saved the life he was never able to fully live because he lost those years due to war.

"Kar-ee"

While it is still fresh on my mind I feel that I should probably write an abstraction of the basic thesis of my paper.
IN both the texts of Cat's Cradle and The Things They Carried I found that their is a distinct parallel between the physical items that they charcters carried and the emotional impact and responsibility that ensued. For instance, in Cat's Cradle such a parallel lies in the carrying of the chemical compound "ice-nine." Though the physical of the item is nearly non existent the emotional turmoil that it causes weighs quite heavily on the Hoenikker children. This can be clearly seen in their relationship with their father. The object ice-nine is transformed by the death of their father into a lasting reminder of their cold and distant relationship that existed throughout the course of their lives. This relationship is also found in the lasting memory that ensues as a result of the last memory of their father being a frozen chunk of man sitting in a chair. Needless to say this is quite traumatizing to see the man who raised you sitting frozen in time (literally). This further follows them throughout their lives through the ice-nine they each carry. Though the pieces of their father melted away they memory of the state in which they found him lives on through his invention. Along with this memory comes a responsibility for the fate of the world. That is a pretty heavy weight if you ask me.
This parallel is again found in The Things They Carried. In describing the physical weight of what the soldiers carries, Tim O'Brien is creating a more relatable parallel for the emotional weight these men carried. Like Cat's Cradle, the responsibility for lives also weighs quite heavily on the consciences of the soldiers in charge.
Overall, I found that there was a stark parallel between the two novels that I did not believe existed until I further forced myself to find one.

Speaking of the Dead

At any funeral it is commonplace to tell a story. We recite memories of the deceased and lessons learned together and mistakes that kept us laughing years later. This need to recount the person's impact on our own lives is a way to keep them alive for a second longer. Give them one last breath after their lungs have gone cold. In Cat's Cradle and The Things They Carried the dead come up again and again because even though they have passed they still affect the living. 

In Cat's Cradle Dr. Hoenikker, though deceased before the narrative begins, is brought up over and over again because of the affect his creations had and continue to have on the living. Through the creation of both the atom bomb and ice nine Dr. Hoenikker devastates and livens the world. He gives Jonah a purpose by providing him fodder to write both "The Day The World Ended" and the text itself. He gives the San Lorenzans a final salvation from their suffering, giving them more life in death than they had ever had in life. Through his death at the crystal hands of ice nine Dr. Hoenikker gave his children the key to some happiness in their lives, despite how short it may have been. The death of Dr. Hoenikker and the death his creations gave out wholesale provided life for many other characters.

In The Things They Carried the narrator, Timmy, usually talks about his war buddies in reference their deaths. Timmy does this with Ted Lavender, Curt Lemon, Henry Dobbins, and Norman Bowker. All of these people come to life in their deaths. Their deaths spark other parts of their lives to resurface in Timmy's mind and that is how we as readers get the fully developed characters. Death is inseparable from their lives. 

In both novels death provides some sort of life. It adds value to the experiences of others.  

Carrying Emotional Baggage

            The narrator of The Things They Carried or Timmy, as he shall now be referred to, wrote in his last chapter that he brings Linda to life every night when he sleeps. He creates dreams of elaborate scenarios where he meets her, and each time she would tell him "Do I look dead?" (231). Timmy described it as "a kind of self-hypnosis. Partly willpower, partly faith, which is how stories arrive" (231). In this quote I believe Timmy admits that stories are created because people want to believe in another reality in order to manage the stresses in their lives. Timmy's dreams were able to help him move on with the death of his friend by giving him a universe where Linda existed.

            Some people created alternate realities to make their original ones seem better. Sanders enjoyed telling many stories, one of which was of a group of soldiers who were to go into the forest and listen for enemy movement (70). In this story the men began to hear clear music during the time they were there. They heard the voices of the mountains and rocks of the country and eventually cannot cope with the noises. They reported enemy movement and blew up the entire forest only to find nothing there. I believe Sanders told this story to help his mind cope with his current reality. He invents this tale of soldiers who are in an even worse situation than him, and who are unable to handle the pressure. Compared to this reality, his current one seems much more survivable.

            Timmy also created many stories in this book to recreate situations so he could deal with them. The entire chapter "On the Rainy River" could have been invented, but the essence is what was important. To Timmy, this chapter manifested a new world where he had a chance to once again go through the emotions he felt when he was drafted into the war. Re-experiencing the fear and frustration he felt at that time so many years later and putting it down in words was his minds way of dealing with emotions he has had inside him for years. "By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself" (152). Stories provide a means for people to create alternate universes, and these new realities seem to have to ability to take on some of  the emotional baggage everyone has.      

Another Tim

Innocence cannot truly be preserved, but is that really such a bad thing? Although we may try to convince ourselves of its eternal perseverance, our attempts are never lucrative. Part of what makes an individual innocent, is a lack of awareness, and once we are enlightened, we cannot rewind to our former blank minds. An example of an individual's forever loss of innocence is my older brother. My brother, coincidentally named Tim, has been a firefighter since the age of sixteen. As a teenager, Tim experienced frequent life-threatening situations, from Philadelphia row home house fires,  to I-95 motorcycle accidents, to Skukill river water rescues. He was forced to grow up quickly. Tim's biggest stresses in high school weren't who he would take to junior prom, or whether or not the eagles would make it to the Superbowl, instead they were whether or not he had enough oxygen left in his tank to stay in the burning building, or if he would be able to regain a man's pulse. As a result of his exposure to such heavy truths at such a young age, Tim knew the realities of life much earlier than his teenage counterparts
From this description of my brother, many of you may picture him as a stern, cold person. But in reality, Tim is one of the goofiest people I know. He is a constantly smiling, and always looking to boost someone's spirits with humor. But do not be mislead by his silliness. When precarious or potentially dangerous situations arise, Tim is the first to react to the situation. He is able to instantly snap into "real world" mode, assessing the situation, and creating a plan. Tim's childhood innocence, including the intangibility of death and the seemingly forever persistence of human happiness, will never be reacquired. But would he really want them back? In my opinion, adult innocence is simply stupidity. There comes a time when we must all experience those seemingly impossible downs in life, for these downs allow us to more truly experience the ups.

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.

Comforting Redundancy

The redundancy of the game “cat’s cradle” correlates perfectly with the redundancy of telling a war story. Timmy, the writer, finds himself perpetually talking in circles about the same core concepts. He reiterates time and time again about the embarrassment of not going to war. In the chapter “The Man I Killed” he goes into excruciating detail regarding the dead man, always returning to the “star-shaped hole [that] was red and yellow” (120). In fact very rarely does Timmy seem to have a focused story in which the beginning and end are entirely clear. Instead, the stories are manipulated and adjusted as they are being told, and it is all up to Timmy’s discretion. One would consider these stories pointless if they cannot be nailed down concretely, and yet Timmy must keep writing these stories, just as the child continues to play with the cat’s cradle.

            War as we have said, can never be directly addressed but rather it has to be talked around. In talking around the war, no conclusion can ever be drawn because there is no focal point to return to. This is the problem that Timmy finds himself ensnared in. He recognizes the implicit irrelevance of his stories and yet, “it occurred to [him] that the act of writing had led [him] through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse” (152). Writing then becomes cathartic for him and must be continued. He recognizes that he must keep playing with the same stories in order to perfect them, and make them fill the void in his writing, which is the war itself. It is comforting to work through the events and alter them in order to make sense of them.

Kathleen

Today in class, we talked about how Kathleen may represent the portion of readers that have not experienced the Vietnam War. I re-read the section where Kathleen visits Vietnam with Tim (the writer), and I am now even more convinced that O’Brien(the author) wrote his readers into the story as his daughter to represent the inadequacy of the reaction he receives from the general public. As Tim is going through Vietnam, he wants “to take [his] daughter to the places [he’d] seen as a soldier. [He] want[s] to show her the Vietnam that kept [him] awake at night” (176). Tim feels so strongly about the places he visits, yet Kathleen’s reaction is “‘That’s weird.’” (175). She represents the reader that has no idea what happened in the war, and does not understand a former soldier’s reactions to all the stimuli that comes from re-visiting that time. His ordeals are “as remote to her as cavemen and dinosaurs” (175). This represents the reader’s reactions to O’Brien’s true war stories. They don’t have the necessary elements to make the audience feel what he has felt, which is why he writes this novel as fiction, and halfway through, tells the audience that although all the stories are lies, it does not matter. Kathleen’s reaction to her father’s journey to Vietnam is placed into the novel to show the reader what the reaction to a true war story is. There need to be lies to make the feelings present. The details don’t matter, simply the feelings behind them, and I feel that this chapter is O’Brien’s peace offering. I think he is saying, “Yes, these stories are all lies and none of them actually happened, but here is what your reaction would be if I told you the plain truth.”  Without the lies, the general public wouldn’t feel the same as soldiers enduring the war. They would react as Kathleen does, with tolerance and concealed boredom. Instead, O’Brien brings the feelings of the war right into the readers’ lives. I see this chapter as an explanation of that logic.

Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

A conundrum: from my very unscientific research, I have discovered that a majority of people dislike having the end of a book or movie given away. Among the reasons offered are assertions that it "takes the fun away, " "ruins the surprise," or prevents one from "figuring it out" alone.

So then, why do we reread books? (I can't be the only one who's read the Harry Potter series more times than I can count). Why do we watch the same movies over and over again? (I know The Parent Trap by heart and still love it). Why the fascination with fortune telling, horoscopes, and Ouija boards? And why do the guests of honor at surprise parties always look more frightened and disconcerted than genuinely pleased? I thought we liked surprises.

I think we have two conflicting desires: the desire to have it all at once, and the desire to enjoy the ride. An indecipherable story leaves us thinking How can this possibly end?, but something prevents us from flipping to the final chapter to find out. It feels like cheating. But once we've finished the book, that's no longer cheating. From here, our second desire can overtake our first.

In the case of books, I know why I personally reread them.

1) Reading a book is having an experience. If I enjoy that experience, I want to experience it again. It's like getting a massage or eating a chocolate chip cookie. If it's nice, do it again. If it keeps entertaining you, keep reading it until you're satisfied. That's the base, hedonist view of things.

2) If I enjoy Reading #1 of Book A, and I enjoy Reading #2 of Book A, it does not necessarily mean I enjoy the readings in the same way, or event the same amount. Reading #1 may have that element of surprise, that satisfaction of learning something new, or of taking a journey and arriving somewhere. Reading #2 removes that surprise, but also some of the tension. It allows me to slow down without worrying about the ending. I am able to notice things I might have skimmed over or not spent enough time thinking about. Once I know the ending, I can see better how the events before it must lead to it.

What do you guys think? Why do we revisit things when the "surprise" is "ruined"?

Ghosts

In the jungle of Vietnam, many lines are blurred.  The lines between good and bad, friends and enemies, and reality and imagination become unclear.  O’Brien explains, “We called the enemy ghosts (202)”.  I’m not entirely sure what enemy O’Brien is referring to, though.  Certainly he could mean the Viet Cong soldiers that the men are actually fighting.  But perhaps he means something quite different; maybe he is saying that ghosts themselves are the enemies.  Throughout the novel, O’Brien repeatedly mentions the spiritual quality of the jungle and mountains, how the wilderness will draw you in and terrify you at the same time.  Some soldiers may fear actual ghosts, the white hooded figures like the one O’Brien attempted to scare Jorgenson with.  But I think the real enemy, the thing that soldiers fear the most, are the ghosts in their heads.  These are the kind of ghosts that haunt their dreams and their waking thoughts, ghosts that make them doubt their eyes, hear voices in the trees, and imagine their friends’ brutal deaths.  These ghosts, the ghosts that take away a soldier’s sanity and cause him to lose his grip on reality, are the true enemies.  But how can a soldier fight the ghosts in his head when he is surrounded by violence, death, heartbreak, loneliness, guilt and so many other demons? How can he beat his greatest enemy if it resides within the confines of his own mind?

The Power of Stories

            The ending of The Things They Carried ties together quite nicely a metaphor of the importance of stories. Stories have the ability to make “the dead sometimes smile and sit up and return to the world.” O’Brien uses his stories to bring everyone he lost back to life. For the time it takes to read the story, the characters are as vivacious and full of life as ever, even if it’s just in our imaginations. The metaphor fully comes together when Linda says being dead is “like being inside a book that nobody’s reading” and “all you can do is…just hope somebody’ll pick it up and start reading.” In this passage the dead literally live in books, driving home O’Brien’s point that writing is the way to keep them alive.

            O’Brien ties all of his metafictional elements together at the end like this not through another account of a friend lost in war, but through Timmy’s first love, an innocent nine year old girl. Strange, it seems, that more than 200 pages focused around the war culminates with something so far removed from it. But this is not a story about the war at all. As O’Brien tells us early on, “a true war story is never about the war.” Naturally this holds true for his own works. A war story on the surface, The Things They Carried is actually a narrative about many, many other things – guilt, love, friendship, death, fear, courage – but above all it’s about stories. Metafiction at its very finest.