No Blank Pages

           Reading “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott made me feel better about how my writing process goes. I write the same way that Lamott described. Usually I just start typing whatever pops into my head. Maybe it’s because I hate staring at blank pages and feel the need to get something down, even if it hardly makes sense. I jump from idea to idea sometimes not even making full sentences. Even for our writing workshop on Friday, just writing a thesis I had to start by typing everything I could think of that connected Cat’s Cradle and The Things They Carried. I had a full page of a jumble of words and ideas and half sentences before I was able to assemble some sort of thesis. Even when I write these blog posts I just start typing whatever ideas I have in my head. I usually end up with a random assortment of thoughts that don’t even connect and then slowly weed out what I want to say. This blog post also started as a chaotic mess, which is kind of ironic. Anyways, I always thought this way of writing was “wrong”. I know there isn’t really a “right” way to start the process, but my way starts so disorganized and chaotic I didn’t think many people did it that way. Some people just seem so organized and like they immediately know what they want to say. Lamott said that “very few writers know what they’re doing until they’ve done it”. It’s comforting to know that a lot of writers just start typing, just start moving their fingers. It just seems like good writers have it all figured out, all planned out in their heads. I guess sometimes the best way to start writing is just to start writing, even if it starts as merely a spew of half-thoughts and almost-there sentences. 

Shitty (Final) Drafts

“Shitty First Drafts” and “Perfectionism” summed up a lot of the problems I face when I’m writing. I often expect to sit down, devote several hours to a paper, and get a top-notch paper out of it. Even if I’m able to crank out this seemingly good paper, I don’t even know if it’s good until I’ve read it a couple times and make adjustments. So I guess I do a first/second/maybe third draft without even realizing it. One of my favorite lines was from from “Shitty First Drafts”: “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it”. Sometimes I write a paper, I think it’s one of my best, and then my teacher doesn’t even know what my point was in my paper. Other times, I’ll write what I think is complete and utter nonsense, and I’ll do well. It’s really hard to tell what value your paper has, in terms of content, because every reader is going to get something different out of it based on their own experiences and thought processes. That’s why “Perfectionism”, and this class, resonated with my really well. I often get so caught up on what I think I should be writing about, and don’t think about what I want to be talking about.

If Hermione Were The Main Character In Harry Potter

The ending is relevant to our recent discussion on HP.

My Own War

Tim. Timmy. O’Brien.

A narrator. A child. An author.

A forty-three year old man. A nine-year old boy. A forty-three year old man.
A man with a daughter. A boy with a girl. A man with nothing and everything, bound in his own spell of memory and imagination.

A man imagined. A boy imagined. A man imagining, imagining that the first would save the second, with a story.

I could go on and on, rambling about contradictions and parallels, trying to persuade you of this abstract, fuzzy argument I came up with a while ago about this body of text, or more like a tool for O’Brien to reconstruct his being, to formalize his ways and words, to confront his happening past by drowning himself in story past, to no longer be a coward.

But I read and read and read, and I tried to fit this scramble of a rhetoric with the relevance of a war story, with how war stories and love stories are two things, with how this body of text ends with a love story despite the assumptions we’ve made along the way that all evidence should point to the contrary. And I lost myself to logic.

The blurring of narrative frames (writer, narrator, character). The proxies of vantage points (first person within third person, third person within first person and their various derivatives). The gore in one page and the bliss on the next. It was, I admit, excruciatingly tough to keep a coherent train of thought throughout this bloated “objectified” experience. I can’t even muster a tiny weeny bit of confidence to argue who was it exactly that said “you objectify your own experience.” (152) I’m afraid to be wrong, not because there’s this part of me that thinks to be wrong is to be weak, to be intellectually compromised. I just don’t want to lose my grips on this text.

When I first picked up this text I decided to put my nationality out of the way. What I was born into, I thought, was too complicating a factor. Potential for conflicts of interest was high. So I wasn’t Vietnamese. The war that took place in the text could have been anywhere else. It was meant to be a primitive, uncivilized backdrop against which amorality came to a head. Many places could fit that description. I shouldn’t feel offended. So I left my nationality out of the way. In hindsight, because logic alone didn’t guide me to shore,  that was probably not a good idea. I was paralyzed, like that character on that boat that tried to swim to Canada to dodge the draft but couldn’t because his sense of courage was at a tug of war with his social conditioning. Only difference in my case is that all the neurons that are dying by the second inside me are put against the regret of such impersonal choice of MO.

So at this point late into the night I’m trying to regain my autonomy as a living, breathing entity with roots, full of hopes of whatever miracle  it brings in trying to understand the nature of existence of characters that live and die and are hauntingly realer than real. But what I’m getting is no truer than the feelings I got when listening to mother’s stories about stray bullets and rains that breathed fire and that kept Quang Ngai hurt and awake for as long as her eleven year old self could remember. But then what do I do with them? And is anyone of them even a sign of a subconscious awareness of how war stories and love ones aren’t one and the same? And why does it matter? So what if O’Brien is making me creating my own war?

A strage metaphor about driving...

Memories have a way of coming back around. In the chapter “Speaking of Courage,” Norman Bowker spends a day driving the seven-mile loop around a lake in his hometown. The aimless, circular driving acts as a metaphor for the experience of coming home from war. For many, the haunting memories constantly reappear and aimlessness is unavoidable. Norman could not find a purpose back home. He could not stop the cycle of driving around the lake nor could he break the cycle of sleeping in, playing basketball at the Y, and drinking a six-pack every day. This reminded me of the way we complain about boredom so often in our everyday lives and yet make no effort to fix the problem. Our complacency is only intensified by our fear of change, leading to an endless loop of life. This loop feels safe for most people but for those who have experienced the vivid realness of life in a combat zone, it is terrifying. It is like getting off winding back roads and merging on to a highway that appears to have no exit. To those that have never known anything but the highway, the back roads look scary and uninviting. Which way is the better? Do we all need to go to war to know what living is truly like? Can we ever really know what the other route is like?

I know that was very dark and morbid. Don’t worry; I don’t stay up all night pondering the point of my existence. I wouldn’t trade the highway I’m on and I’m not sure the back-roaders would want my spot on the highway. Perhaps that makes life a win-win situation or maybe it makes it a lose-lose. I don’t know and maybe it doesn’t matter. Either way, The Things They Carried exposes the experience of a life I will most likely never live.

Speaking of Courage

The chapter Speaking of Courage struck my emotions. In the rest of the book, I felt very disconnected from the characters and the story. However, hearing Tim O'Brien talk about how Norman Bowker felt when he returned from war made me really feel for him. I don't like feeling lied to. But even though O'Brien made up certain parts of the story, he formed it in such a way that the untrue details did not take away the significance of it. The lies did not matter much to me, because O'Brien was still able to portray Norman's emotions very well.

The parts that struck me most were the repetitiveness of Norman's drive, the continuous and static nature of the people he passed, and how he was imagining telling his story to people. I felt really bad for Norman- he came back from war, and he had so much emotion, thoughts, and trauma built up inside of him. He desperately wanted to tell someone about it, and how he almost won the Silver Star medal. But there was no one he could turn to. Sally was busy with her life that continued even while Norman was at war, his friend Max was dead, and his father was at home watching baseball. The person on the intercom was willing to listen to his story, but Norman does not want to bother him. When O'Brien mentioned at the end of the chapter that he had committed suicide, I was not even surprised. I just hope Norman Bowker can rest knowing that the readers of The Things They Carried were all listening to his story.

Form and Communication

After reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, I noticed very similar writing styles with Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Both authors admit that not everything they say is true. O'Brien even includes a chapter entitled "How to Tell A True War Story." After I read this chapter, I came to a conclusion that there are no war stories with the absolute truth. Like we said in class, even if we truly experienced an event, we can tell the story differently or incorrectly. We can never exactly tell someone what happened. Another similarity I noticed is that there are many versions of O'Brien as there were many versions of Jonah in Cat's Cradle. I concluded that there are several Tim O'Brien's including O'Brien as a soldier, as a writer, as a narrator, as a father, as a husband, as a son, and as a kid.

I also noticed a lot of interesting things about O'Brien's writing style. O'Brien uses a lot of repetition to evoke a sense of paralysis. The use of repetition such as the list of the things they carried or the constant mentioning of guilt makes one feel paralyzed within the specific story. For example, I could feel the sense of paralysis in, "Speaking of Courage." I could feel Norman Bowker's inability to communicate after his 12th revolution driving around his hometown. O'Brien also uses many symbols throughout each chapter. The 12 revolutions reminded me of a clock and how no matter how much time kept passing, he was unable to communicate. In Mary Anne's story, the necklace of tongues that she comes back with has a lot of meaning as well. I could argue that Mary Anne was figuratively "eaten" up by Vietnam. The cut up tongues could also symbolize the death of communication.

Through explaining how to communicate war stories and by explaining the things they carried in the Vietnam War, O'Brien emphasizes the difficulty and death of communication. Through good form, O'Brien is trying to make us feel. The stories themselves are almost irrelevant since they are not true, he just wants to communicate the emotions he felt. I think the purpose of the characters' individual stories is to the show how often "they" struggle to communicate through different stories.

War Strangely Beautiful?

I enjoyed reading how war was described in "How To Tell A True War Story," as the opposite of what everyone that has not experienced war expects.

"War is hell, but that's not the half of it, because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love." 

"It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty."

I was taken by the above passages. I was especially taken by this idea that when a soldier is close to death, they are even closer to life and in that strange way, war can be distantly beautiful. When a person is put in a place full of such horror, they are bound to focus on the details that help them escape. 

A Tree is a Tree

In class on Wednesday Professor Schwartz talked about how things are only what they are because we say it. She gave the example of a tree. She said that tree isn’t a tree, it’s not even an object. At this point she looked over at me and said, “I lost K.C.” It wasn’t that I was lost, I just didn’t agree, but I couldn’t think of how to frame my argument. And we all know fighting behind the veil of the internet is much easier, so here I go. I have always been a science/math person, so I like things to be logical and to have one clear answer. The definition of an object is a material that can be seen and touched. We have created this definition and placed certain things into this category. I understand that we have created this term object and nothing has actually changed just because we called it an object. It’s a man made term, I get that. But doesn’t calling something by a certain name make it just that. We have created this definition, and that tree falls under that definition, making it an object. A book is a book because that’s what we call it, my name is K.C. because that’s what I say it is, and If I Die in a Combat Zone is a memoir because O’Brien says it is. I can see how you could say all these things are arbitrarily assigned, but if we don’t believe people when they assign something a name, then how would we define anything? I don’t know if this makes sense, but to me, a tree is a tree.  

Words as a Weapon

When I said in class on Friday that the scenes depicted in O’Brien’s novel The Things They Carried were not really scenes of war, I was incorrect. Looking back, there are plenty of depictions of gory battles and warfare that are depicted. What I was noticing (I can now see with the beautiful gift of hindsight) was that the scenes weren’t really being used to tell war stories, they were used as literary tools to tell other stories.

We talked about this a little bit in class: the story of Rat Kiley and the water buffalo. This might be, for me, the most stomach-churning scene I’ve read in quite a while, and plenty of violence is described explicitly. However, as we talked about in class, the violence is there as a literary weapon, driving home the love Rat Kiley felt for Curt Lemon and the hurt he felt when his sister did not answer.

Another scene that made me think along these lines was O’Brien’s description of Kiowa’s death from Norman Bowker’s point of view. The mortar attack in the shit-field is nothing if not part of the war. It is a gruesome fast paced battle, but I think that it is used as a parallel for the helplessness Norman Bowker felt when he returned from the war. In the following chapter, Notes, the author informs us that the lake is supposed to be a parallel for the field, which leads me to believe there are many other parallels there (the Fourth of July fireworks and the mortars and flares are an example). O’Brien, I think, shows the helplessness of someone suffering a mortar attack and unable to save his friend because it shows how helpless Bowker felt once he returned from the war, especially without a Silver Star for valor.

War...War Never Changes

When reading The Things They Carried, I couldn’t help but notice similarities in its style to Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. In many ways, the attitudes of the characters in Tim O’Brien’s novel are similar to those of Jonah and the Hoenikker family. In terms of their opinions on horrible life events, the Hoenikkers and soldiers have very similar reactions. The soldiers go up to the dead man in the village that was killed by one of their airstrikes and each shake his hand. Newt shows a similar insensitivity to death in his letter to Jonah. He talks about two girls at his University that killed themselves in a gorge, in a very offhand way. He mentions what sorority they wanted to get into, tri delt, which seemed to me to be similar to the soldiers shaking the dead man’s hand in terms of its insensitivity towards the dead. The information that Newt offers almost seems to be the level of a handshake. An offhand comment that acknowledges that the girls did have an identity, but not enough information to show that he cares at all.

There are other examples in addition to these, but these ones made me think that those who were in wars might think alike. Vonnegut who fought in WWII and O’Brien who fought in Vietnam seem to impose similar views about death on their characters. It might be an interesting investigation to look more closely into how Vonnegut and O'Brien's views on death are similar, and how they are different. This might give some insight about how Vietnam and WWII were different for soldiers psychologically, or it might indicate that in fact all wars affect their participants in a similar way.

Death Is One of My Biggest Fears

…that being said, I was a little bit uncomfortable with the way that it was presented in this novel. The characters make death seem like it isn’t a big deal, which I sort of understand because the concept of it consumes their lives while they’re away at war and afterwards. I guess I just couldn’t imagine ever treating a dead body the way that they did- shaking hands, speaking for it, treating it with an “illusion of aliveness” (218). However, I did really like how his (almost) infatuation with death made sense with the story at the end about Linda. This is a stupid reference, but it kind of reminded me of The Fault In Our Stars, because they were young, in love, one of them dies and the other manages to keep them alive in some way. Even though the story about Linda and the rest of the book about the war don’t seem to connect, the way the author Tim O’Brien remembers them is the same in the sense that he makes details up about both stories in order to make sense out of them. The author says that “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 the head” (218).  This is how he relates the story of Vietnam to the reader, and how he keeps Linda alive in his mind. I’m glad that the bit about Linda at the end was included because it seemed to tie everything together is actually what made me like this novel.

A Soldier's Lie

After finishing The Things they Carried, I was really intrigued at what the author was getting at. From Friday’s class, Professor Schwartz reminded us about the title that the author had given to the book. Although O’Brian himself went to war, for some reason he names the book The Things THEY Carried and not The Things WE Carried. Along with the title, O’Brian goes on within the text to a chapter that really jumped out at me. The title of the chapter was How to Tell a True War Story. Within the chapter, O’Brian talks about how true war stories shouldn’t instruct, encourage virtue, prevent men from doing something already done, and last of all seem moral. This is when it struck me that even courageous and incredible war stories told by veterans of war could all potentially be flawed by the minds of soldiers. In order to survive in the warzone, soldiers must tell lies to keep up their moral and positivity. One example within the text is Henry Dobbins. Similar to a lucky pair of underwear, Dobbins has a pair of pantyhose from his ex-girlfriend. Although the pantyhose will not protect him from danger, he carries it as a beacon of hope to push him through the harsh times of war. Without telling themselves lies, these soldiers get into mental battles within their brain losing their sanity. The last few pages of the book were what got me really thinking. O'Brian talks about a girl named Linda who he had fallen in love with when they were 9. However, she tragically died from a brain tumor. But, this didn't stop O'Brian from seeing/imagining her. Instead, O'Brian tells readers that Linda described herself as being an old book. She says "All you can do is wait. Just hope somebody'll pick it up and start reading". Although Linda may just be a figment of O'Brian's imagination, she still exists within the realms of his imagination. Similar to the soldiers ways of lying to keep themselves sane and to make a name of themselves, O'Brian lies to himself in order to try to make a name of himself and be put down as something in history.