Compare and Contrast
In Mason’s novel In Country, Emmett is in Vietnam during the war just as Tim O’Brien was. These two characters contrast drastically in the way in which they cope with the aftermath of the war.
Emmett’s way of dealing with this war is really not to talk about it. The only thing that he really talks about up to this point in the book is the “prettiest bird [he] ever saw,” which was the egret (36). Besides that, Emmett does not really go into detail about what happened to him during his time in Vietnam. One way he does seem to cope with it is by drinking and smoking his “sweet stuff” (35). As of now he basically is living off of his sister while living with his niece, and has not been able to bring himself to get a real job. The only time that we read about Emmett really talking about the war is when “Sam was seven or eight, Emmett . . . told Sam war stories’ (51), but besides this time, we don’t really understand what all Emmett went through.
Opposed to Emmett, O’Brien does talk about his experiences while in the war. Although O’Brien actually is telling his story for a good portion of his book, it is apparent that his way of dealing with the things that he encountered in Vietnam is to write them out.
These stark contrasts in dealing with this allow the reader to understand that people have to cope differently in situations. IN this case, O’Brien is able to cope with the war through writing out stories about it and allowing us to relive his own experience, where as Emmett does not really talk about anything from Vietnam, he just smokes and drinks away his anxieties of the war.
One scene from In Country was a complete reminder of “Hearts and Minds.” At the end of Chapter 4 in Part 2, Sam describes what she saw on the news once they got their first color TV. She saw “a child in a T-shirt and no pants r[un] down the road” (51). This seems just as one of the scenes from the film, watching small children run down the road while air planes sprayed Agent Orange from above.
In Mason’s novel In Country, Emmett is in Vietnam during the war just as Tim O’Brien was. These two characters contrast drastically in the way in which they cope with the aftermath of the war.
Emmett’s way of dealing with this war is really not to talk about it. The only thing that he really talks about up to this point in the book is the “prettiest bird [he] ever saw,” which was the egret (36). Besides that, Emmett does not really go into detail about what happened to him during his time in Vietnam. One way he does seem to cope with it is by drinking and smoking his “sweet stuff” (35). As of now he basically is living off of his sister while living with his niece, and has not been able to bring himself to get a real job. The only time that we read about Emmett really talking about the war is when “Sam was seven or eight, Emmett . . . told Sam war stories’ (51), but besides this time, we don’t really understand what all Emmett went through.
Opposed to Emmett, O’Brien does talk about his experiences while in the war. Although O’Brien actually is telling his story for a good portion of his book, it is apparent that his way of dealing with the things that he encountered in Vietnam is to write them out.
These stark contrasts in dealing with this allow the reader to understand that people have to cope differently in situations. IN this case, O’Brien is able to cope with the war through writing out stories about it and allowing us to relive his own experience, where as Emmett does not really talk about anything from Vietnam, he just smokes and drinks away his anxieties of the war.
One scene from In Country was a complete reminder of “Hearts and Minds.” At the end of Chapter 4 in Part 2, Sam describes what she saw on the news once they got their first color TV. She saw “a child in a T-shirt and no pants r[un] down the road” (51). This seems just as one of the scenes from the film, watching small children run down the road while air planes sprayed Agent Orange from above.
2 comments:
I think you are definetely right about how the two characters reacted to the war. Emmett also reminds me of the character from the "Red Convertible" story, in how he was almost never talking about the war or what he had experienced
Yes, i feel the same way. In addition to both of them not talking about the war, they both had something small they did to cpe with it. In "Red Convertible," he would work on the car in order to deal with the aftershock of the war. In the scene where Emmett is digging near the house, this reminds me of the character in "Red Convertible" constantly working on his car.
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