First and foremost, I think a Vietnam story can’t really be about war. The stories worth telling aren’t about coordinates on a map or hard numbers and facts. The stories that really matter are about people fighting and dying next to each other, doing everything they can for the man next to them. The real stories are about raw emotions; fear, hope, hatred, pride, and yes, even love. O’Brien even mentions this when he tells the story of Curt Lemon and he says “It wasn’t a war story. It was a love story” (85). People don’t want to hear about tactics and maneuvers, they can’t relate to these things. But everyone knows what it’s like to have a good friend. Everyone knows what it’s like to be afraid. Emotions are what set us apart from all other life on this planet and they are the only things that connect all of us together. Along with not being about war, I feel a true Vietnam story is about the little things. The pantyhose around Henry Dobbins neck, the way the sunlight glowed on Curt Lemon as he was lifted into it, the star shaped hole on the man O’Brien may or may not have killed. It’s the little details that stick with you in the end. It’s the details that make the story believable, whether it’s true or not. Susan Farrell mentions this in her article when she says “Vietnam writers often focus on the surface details of daily existence--the everyday routines of war, the jokes, conversations, superstitious rituals--rather than on larger historical or political questions about the war.”
I feel a story that exemplifies both of these aspects is one that I’ve already mentioned twice, Curt Lemon’s death. The story was about “sunlight” and about “love”, not war (85). The story wasn’t told to make people sad, it was told to show the love between Rat Kiley and Curt. Like any good tragedy, it demonstrates that in losing a lot, you realize how much you had. Additionally, it is a story rich with detail and the “little things” that stick in your mind days after you read it. “It’s about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do” (85).
3 comments:
I definitely agree. The emotions and surface level things are really important in communicating what actually happened in the war, and how O'Brien felt. Not everybody knows what it's like to be bombed at, but you can definitely identify to losing a good friend. I think that's what O'Brien wants to do. He wants the reader to identify with what he writes.
Do you think he does an effective job of identifying to the reader?
I agree that Vietnam literature is not about the actual war and the strategy on how to win it. The majority of literature and film I have seen about Vietnam is about personal experiences that these veterans remember. They seldom talk about coordinates and facts like you say in your post. Vietnam literature is about the people not about the war and I think that is very unique to any other war literature.
Ashleigh, I would say that he does an excellent job of that. We can not even begin to understand the kind of things Tim O'Brien saw in Vietnam and yet, as we've talked about before, we are somehow able to relate on a certain level. We've all lost friends, maybe not to bullets but to an illness. We've all had times where it seems like no one wants to listen to what you have to say, even if we don't go driving around lakes to deal with it. The book touches the reader on an intense emotional level and I feel it couldn't do that without also relating stories in the book to stories in our real lives.
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