This week you are reading three different excerpts: Yellow Birds, The Things They Carried and Redeployment. The language in these texts capture and hold so much. As a result, I want you to pick a paragraph that you think is very powerful. Type the paragraph before you unpack it. Then, I want you to unpack the language. Pull it apart explaining what and how the language works to create meaning. Use your literary devices to aid you in your thinking and analysis. After you have unpacked the passage, tell us why it matters?
From How To Tell a True War Story: “He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down hard, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth away. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter the the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain. He shot off the tail. He shot away chunks of meat below the ribs. All around us there was the smell of smoke and filth and deep greenery, and the evening was humid and very hot. Rat went to automatic. He shot randomly, almost casually, quick little spurts in the belly and butt. The he reloaded, squatted down, and shot it in the left front knee. Again the animal fell hard and tried to get up, but this time it couldn’t quite make it. It wobbled and went down sideways. Rat shot it in the nose. He bent forward and whispered something, as if talking to a pet, then he shot it in the throat. All the while the baby buffalo was silent, or almost silent, just a light bubbling sound where the nose had been. It lay very still. Nothing moved except the eyes, which were enormous, the pupils shiny black and dumb.”
ReplyDeleteAs a whole this paragraph was very direct; there were no elaborate words nor lengthy explanations, rather it was to the point and quite objective in tone. Anaphora was used in this paragraph, the words “he shot” often being repeated at the beginning of sentences. This repetition leads the readers to anticipate the next line and the next action of Rat, another shot at the baby water buffalo. The fact that the water buffalo was a baby - the essence of innocence - it is almost shocking that there is no pity felt for it while it takes this beating that it arguably did nothing to deserve. Through the victim being a baby buffalo, it is put into perspective for the audience how much pain Rat is in, along with the rest of his platoon. Rat made this baby buffalo suffer, breaking it down bit by bit as opposed to just killing it. Rat did not want to simply end the animal’s life, because that would be too quick and painless for the creature; rather, he wanted it to suffer terribly, he wanted it to feel the anguish and misery that he felt as a result of Curt’s death. When the buffalo finally falls over, Rat kneels down and speaks to it “as if talking to a pet”. This part of the passage might have caught my attention the most. Rat got down on the level of the buffalo and showed compassion for it before he finally put the animal out of its misery. I believe that in this instance Rat realizes that he is the baby buffalo. He personally did not cause the war, he is not responsible for it, yet he is sent there and as a result he suffers. Rat has his best friend ripped from him in the midst of the “Garden of Evil” and know he is left only with anguish and misery. Curt had acted as Rat’s saving grace - he had kept a smile on Rat’s face through their time together fighting the war despite all of the adversity they were dealing with - and when he was taken from Rat, he had to feel the full force of his torment. Rat wanted another creature to feel his pain, he did not want to suffer alone, so he chose another innocent and put it through so much pain before letting its misery end just as he wish his would end. This can be related back to any adversity, not just war. Humans are group creatures, they crave the company of others, in misery as well as in sadness. Humans want others to feel their pain so that they need not bear it alone, the burden of suffering is perceived to be lighter when carried by more than just one. That is why this passage matters, because it explains the desire of all humans when they are tormented, the desire to not be alone in their tribulations, since feeling alone on top of feeling anguished just intensifies that grief that humans wish to rid themselves of.
ReplyDelete(Just an extra note, upon reading this passage I immediately thought of a scene from the movie The Princess Bride, which I believe does a good job at applying the reasoning that I used in dissecting the passage above. Here is a link to the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_keWS1i3RA )
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, 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 firefight, 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. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost. At the hour of dusk you sit at your foxhole and look out on a wide river turning pinkish red, and at the mountains beyond, and although in the morning you must cross the river and go into the mountains and do terrible things and maybe die, even so, you find yourself studying the fine colors on the river, you feel wonder and awe at the setting of the sun, and you are filled with a hard, aching love for how the world could be and always should be, but now is not.”
ReplyDeleteWIthin this passage the author uses mainly antitheses in order to convey a message about living in juxtaposition with dying. The author starts this thought by juxtaposing war and peace. This forces the reader to remove generalizations about war. The reader may not be able to connect with war but they can always connect with peace. The opening line of this passage puts the reader into a position from which they can analyze the text. The antitheses continues when he explains why war/death brings people closer to life. This is important because it gives the reader the context of their struggle and it imposes a slightly positive connotation to war. The author goes on to explain how firefights make him feel more alive and appreciate the beauty of the world. This is done in an interesting way by using short, concise sentences in order to move the pacing along. He then attacks the reader with pathos stating, “in the midst of evil you want to be a good man” this allows the reader to connect with the opinion. The vivid imagery towards the end of the passage, “wide river turning pinkish red” is symbolic of purity being corrupted which helps emphasise his point about having to commit atrocities in the morning. Throughout the passage his second person address to the reader makes it feel more real. It immerses the reader into the story by directly addressing the reader. This matters, this passage matters, because it allows a reader who has never experienced warfare to connect with what the author is saying. While not everyone can connect with the constant fear of death, misery, and atrocities, everyone can relate to the basic feeling of being alive. The author uses descriptions of this feeling to help the reader understand the opposite. His antithesis is particularly effective in this. When life and death are juxtaposed into a symbiotic relationship within the author's consciousness it allows the reader to bridge the gap between their unthreatened life and perils of Vietnam. This passage is powerful because it directly addresses the reader and submerges them into the author's world.
From Prayer in the Furnace: “As a young priest, I’d had a father scream at me once. I was working in a hospital. He’d just lost his son. I thought my clerical collar gave me the right to speak, so right after the doctors called time of death, I went and assured him his infant son was in paradise. Stupid. And of all people, I should have known better. At age fourteen, I lost my mother to a rare form of cancer similar to what struck that father’s son, and every empty condolence I received after my mother’s death only deepened my angry teenage grief. But platitudes are most appealing when they’re least appropriate,” (Klay 153).
ReplyDeleteThis story was a step back from the war detailed in the novel. It stood out to me because it was more relatable than stories of soldiers in unknown places facing daily life that is hard to understand unless it is experienced firsthand. However, many people can understand disease, and loss. The story about the man losing his son triggered more of an emotional response from me than the war, possibly because the father did not sign up for any of this. The sentence in which the chaplain relates himself to the story is also powerful. It allows the reader to get to know him on a more personal level, and know about his childhood and life before the war. It’s necessary to be reminded that there is life outside the war. This story is about two people trying their best. The chaplain is trying to console a father, and the father is trying to deal with his son’s death. The short sentences in the beginning of the paragraph are simply facts. They paint a clear picture that doesn’t leave room for questions. The simple language also doesn’t hold much emotion. The Chaplain seems to be trying to logically find an answer. He’s not angry because he was screamed at. He understands the error of his ways, using the term “clerical collar” to represent his position. Using the word “infant” to describe the son made the situation sadder, because it made the son younger. He also uses the word “paradise” instead of “heaven” which removes the religious connotation, and makes the story relatable to those who do not believe in heaven. “Stupid” stands alone. It shows a shift in the Chaplain’s attitude, he becomes angry at himself. The story of his mother connects him to the reader and to the father. The last sentence “But platitudes are most appealing when they’re least appropriate,” describes the Chaplain’s feeling that he often uses the wrong means to aid a situation.
This passage matters because it creates a relatable story. It also answers the question asked in the paragraph before “What can you do?” The Chaplain shows another time he tries to take action, and it does not work out for him. A similar thing is happening with the marines. The Chaplain is trying to help them, he is trying to help them emotionally survive the war, and help console them through the evils they have committed and witnessed. This can be viewed on a larger scale. We all try to help each other, but often we take the wrong approach. It is hard to find actions we can take to make things better. And, sometimes, there’s nothing we can do.
This passage is from the Prayer in the Furnace excerpt: “This father had watched his healthy child waste away to nothing. It must have been maddening. The months of random emergency room visits. The brief rallies and the inevitable relapses. The inexorable courses of the disease. The final night, his wife collapsed on the hospital floor in terror and grief, shrieking, ‘My baby!’ over and over...And then I came along, after the chemotherapy, after the bankrupting bills and the deterioration of his and his wife’s careers, after the months of hoping and despair, after every possible medical violation had denied his child grace even in death: And I dared suggest some good had come of it? It was unbearable. It was disgusting. It was vile. I didn’t think hope of the life to come would provide comfort for Rodriguez, either. So many young people don’t really believe in heaven, not in a serious way. If God is real, there must be some consolation on earth as well. Some grace. Some evidence of mercy” (Klay 153-154).
ReplyDeleteThis passage particularly stood out to me because of the direct and relatable language Klay uses to convey his message about traumatic war experiences. The chaplain narrates a story through detailed imagery in order to allow the audience to visualize a scenario they may be familiar with. This creates a bridge between a common event and a war crisis. The language brings about religious questioning of God’s existence. In the midst of these tragic events, how can one truly find hope for the future? The reader can relate to the story the chaplain shares because people often find themselves in an event where a positive outcome seems worlds away. Words such as vile, disgusting, and unbearable allow for a clearer understanding of overwhelming emotions people may feel when dealing with crises. The use of dialogue also adds to the emotion of the passage by creating the image of a grieving mother. This language is key in defining the author’s purpose of the entire chapter. Klay attempts to convey the effects of war on the human psyche. As the chaplain reaches out to the grieving parents he seems to flounder, just as he does when working with Rodriguez. This passage matters because Klay shares personal views on religion throughout the passage. The chaplain explains how religion becomes absent in times of trouble. Tragedy often leads to a perspective of a seemingly merciless God and this is clear. The passage as a whole speaks to the audience on many levels. Klay is able to turn a story about the devastating effects of warfare and relate it to the common person.
(PART ONE)
ReplyDeleteAlthough not my favorite of the three passages, “Prayer in the Furnace” from redeployment had a passage that reminded me of something my driver’s education instructor for in-car lessons had once told me, and the religious allusions imbued in it also struck a chord with me. In preparation for his sermon, the narrator cites inspiration from a letter from his own mentor, regarding sin as a “worm around the heart” that keeps people apart, although, since it is universal, it should really be unifying. Thus, to the marines the chaplain tells a story about an Iraqi man whose daughter was dying; he came to the Americans to save her, yet justified that this man could very well despise them, given the atrocities that had been committed. He says to them, “He thinks his suffering justifies making you suffer. If his story about his beating is true, it means the Marines who beat him think that their suffering justifies making him suffer. But as Paul reminds us, ‘There is none righteous, no, not one.’ All of us suffer. We can either feel isolated, and alone, and lash out at others, or we can realize we’re part of a community. A church….Being Christian means we can never look at another human being and says, ‘He is not my brother.’” The chaplain continues, concluding his unpopular work by stating that, “We are part of a long tradition of suffering. We can let it isolate us if we want, but we must realize that isolation is a lie…. Offer suffering up to God, respect your fellow man, and perhaps the sheer awfulness of this place will become a little more tolerable.” (Klay 158-160).
This paragraph is particularly impactful because, in the context of war, it is often extraordinarily difficult for the audience to identify with the characters; as in other passages, they seem and explicitly state that they are emotionally devoid, and this, coupled with circumstances that cannot be understood unless they are personally experienced, can cause a distance between the speaker and the reader. However, “the sheer awfulness of this place”, I believe can be related not only to Iraq, but the general human existence and mortal condition on this planet, something to which all readers who have experienced the emotional tumult of life can relate. At this point in life, things for many - including myself and some of my friends - can seem very bleak at times for many different reasons. Yet, in an unironic word of encouragement to get us by, Klay acknowledges that, although things may ultimately be terrible, two things will always remain true: firstly, just because your suffering may seem on the outside less difficult than that of something in a more challenging situation, your feelings cannot be trivialized, and secondly, the feeling that everything stinks is universal, so opening up to others and allowing the pain to become unifying is preferable over the alternative. In talking about the man’s suffering, his use of repetition and epistrophe really drive the point home, and the allusion to Paul - a man who was blinded and then relieved of his suffering by God - solidifies his argument with a quote from someone who knows a thing or two about pain.
(PART TWO)
ReplyDeleteOn a final note, I would like to add a few words about Laraine P. Fox-McMillan, my morbidly obese instructor for my in-car lessons during the summer before my junior year; she was a spirited Brit, elderly but still full of life and wholly sentient, with a lot of life experience and a lot of Christian zeal to share with me (and presumably any of the others she held captive in that little silver bullet of a car). She was very open with me about everything, sharing lots about her own life. It was an inexorably difficult one; I do not wish to tell all of her stories, but I will share that she had had more than a few failed marriages, a serious incident of kidnapping, several other crimes committed against her, a multitude of battles with illnesses, and so on. Nevertheless, she always valued what I had to say. She was disgustingly interested in my future, what I was feeling, and how my perspective on life as a whole was growing and changing. Although we were only together four times, perhaps that made it easier; she was genuinely invested in the life, future, and mental-emotional state of a 15-year-old she would never see again, but honestly, it made all the difference. Laraine was an extraordinary counselor and guide for me because she never belittled my seemingly-insignificant problems compared to her own, and that made all the difference. Just as the chaplain stated in his sermon, all of us on this planet are constantly struggling with many different things at many different times, and rather than comparing our miseries to one another’s and competing for the award of most morose, we ought to still acknowledge this pain, yet rather than letting it tear us apart, we must unify in the pain we must endure to go on.
“They were just goofing. There was a noise, I suppose, which must have been the detonator, so I glanced behind me and watched Lemon step from the shade into bright sunlight. His face was suddenly brown and shining. A handsome kid, really. Sharp gray eyes, lean and narrow-waisted, and when he died it was almost beautiful, the way the sunlight came around him and lifted him up and sucked him high into a tree full of moss and vines and white blossoms.” (O’Brien 18)
ReplyDeleteThis passage illustrates the death of a young soldier who was not in combat, not fighting for his life, but playing a game with his friend. This horrific and morbid event is not described in bloody, gory details, but is instead described with luminescent imagery. The use of the words “I suppose” demonstrates one of the points O’Brien makes very often throughout the entire chapter; that the truth of a war story depends on how it seemed to the storyteller. Regarding the death of Curt Lemon, it did not seem like a massive explosion slamming a soldier into a tree and ending his life. Instead, to the narrator, it seemed the sun is the cause for Lemon’s death, coming out at the moment he hit the grenade and drawing him up into the tree. O’Brien’s imagery emphasizes Curt Lemon’s youth. He was a kid, healthy with a shining face, who was just goofing around. The use of imagery when describing the sunlight surrounding Lemon and lifting him up, makes his death seem weightless, silent, and dream-like. He is brought upwards by the sun, the reason the Earth can maintain life, and is surrounded by a tree teeming with life, as he is dying, creating a juxtaposition of ideas within this imagery. Watching a friend, a comrade, a buddy die is disturbing and horrifying, and instead of choosing to describe it this way, O’Brien describes the death of a fellow soldier in a beautiful way. What we remember and perceive in the situations around us impact the way we understand and view them. In the case of Curt Lemon, something as grim as his death can be remembered as beautiful, and through this we understand that there can be beauty in horrible things.
“I was not surprised by the cruelty of my ambivalence then. Nothing seemed more natural than someone getting killed. And now, as I reflect on how I felt and behaved as a boy of twenty-one from my position of safety in a warm cabin above a clear stream in Blue Ridge, I can only tell myself that it was necessary: I needed to continue. And to continue, I had to see the world with clear eyes, to focus on the essential. We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare. Rare was the bullet with your name on it, the IED buried just for you. Those were things we watched for.” (Powers, 11-12)
ReplyDeleteThe phrases “not surprised”, “cruelty” and “ambivalence” are the staples of the first sentence. “Not surprised” creates an expectation, or lack thereof, followed by “cruelty” which has a harsh consonant beginning, and the author’s use of diction shows here, and finally “ambivalence”, a term meaning the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. By being not surprised, the author exposes either a state of apathy or of dulled senses. They are used to this. The cruelty of their ambivalence, which is a lovely little phrase, shows how this emotion affects them. By being dulled, the cruelty of their contradictory ideas are exposed, and they are not surprised by this aftermath. As with all war writing the soldiers are noble victims, and Powers is no exception with “I can only tell myself that it was necessary; I needed to continue.” This phrase is again reflective of an internal conflict that Powers is facing, he struggles to understand what he volunteered for and therefore ushers himself toward the conclusion that it was necessary. He then explains what necessary looked and felt like, “We only pay attention to rare things, and death was not rare.” Furthering the victimization of the soldier, and eliciting pity from the reader, this sentence opens with the claim that they only pay attention to rarities, a fact that the author will later build on. “Rare was the bullet with your name on it, the IED buried just for you. Those were the things we watched for.” Contradictory to the idea that death is rare, but allowing that the soldier sees death as a commonplace, while not their own is a syndrome most all humanity suffers from. This contributes to the humanization of the speaker. It matters if you are trying to obtain a better understanding of the mentality of a soldier from Iraq, although it is always important to remember that they signed up for what exactly it is that they are suffering from.
“My biggest duty stateside was planning the memorial service for all sixteen. I struggled to write out something satisfactory to say. How could I express what those deaths meant? I didn’t know myself. In the end, yielding to exhaustion, I wrote an inoffensive little nothing, full of platitudes. The perfect speech for the occasion, actually. The ceremony wasn’t about me. Better to serve my function and pass unnoticed” (Klay 161).
ReplyDeleteThis passage serves as the climax of the chapter, Prayer in the Furnace. Here, the Chaplain has succumbed to the hopelessness of war and the realization that his efforts to aid the soldiers in their suffering were futile. The word “duty” is only used here, showing that he had his own drive to talk with Rodrigez and attempt to make something of the information he told him of, but is now obligated to finish his job and say the final words regarding the fallen soldiers. The Chaplain finds it difficult to “write out something satisfactory to say” knowing that there is nothing pleasing or acceptable about what must be done. In fact, he must “yield to exhaustion”, to write anything at all. The Chaplain is losing his own faith. On the previous pages, he crafts a sermon meant to change the soldiers’ viewpoints by making the insurgents they are recklessly killing more relatable to their own suffering. After their only reaction is “Whoa, Chaps. That got a bit real,” the Chaplain stops trying to change his surroundings and instead he “serves [his] function and passes unnoticed”. He goes from feeling “flushed” and “triumphant” after his sermon to writing an “inoffensive little nothing”; he has lost his passion. The “platitudes” he speaks of relates the reader back to the story of the father with the dying son, where all the Chaplain could say “least appropriate” condolences. This passage matters because it shows that anyone, even a key religious figure such as a Chaplain, can begin to falter after the horrors of war.
From Redeployment: “He’d already lost a son, he told me, to the violence that came after the invasion. He blamed us for that. He blames us for the fact that he can’t walk down the street without fear of being killed for no reason. He blames us for his relatives in Baghdad who were tortured to death. And he particularly blames us for the time he was watching TV with his wife and a group of Americans kicked down his door, dragged his wife out by the hair, beat him in his own living room. They stuck rifles in his face. They kicked him in the side. They screamed at him in a language he did not understand. And they beat him when he could not answer their questions.” (Klay 158)
ReplyDeleteAnaphora is noticeably present in this passage. Four times, successive sentences begin with some variation of “He blames us”, then another four times with “They”. The repetition of these phrases coupled with listing atrocity after atrocity committed by US soldiers - arbitrary killings, torture, beatings, etc. - gives the reader the opportunity to see the war from the opposite perspective from what is typically given them. The premise that the man was doing something as harmless as “watching TV” with his family when soldiers “beat him in his own living room” further compounds the injustice of the acts committed against him.
This then allows the reader to sympathize with a character that would have been portrayed as a one-dimensional “bad guy”, had the story been told from a soldier’s perspective. This gives the reader a chance to see beyond the typical soldier’s tunnel vision and realize that war is never as simple as “good guys” versus “bad guys”.
“We came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I don't know-no farms or paddies- but we chased it down and got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we sat up for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose.
ReplyDeleteHe opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn’t interested.
Rat shrugged
He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain.”
The language in this passage works to create meaning through imagery and repetitive sentence structure. Most prominently, Rat’s force on the water buffalo is portrayed in a solemn, echoing kind of manner. The author creates this by making Rat, the antagonist, the beginning of the sentence and making the subject, the water buffalo, come later. This creates the feel of a narration devoid of emotion, and introduces the message of the damage done by the violence. The imagery present in this paragraph functions in the same way, showing vividly the physical repercussions of a mental affection brought on by the war. This whole idea matters because it is a problem today. Kids who weren’t entirely sure of what they were getting into all those years ago became shocked into a state where numbness is the escape and total consciousness is hell. This is one of the reasons why we see a larger percentage of veterans using and abusing drugs, which often leads to lives of poverty and unfulfillment. It is a problem today that needs a solution to improve the conditions of life after these brave men and women have served.
“In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. 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. It’s about love and memory. It’s about sorrow. It’s about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.”
ReplyDelete“How to Tell a True War Story” was one of my favorites that we read in class. The realness of it and how it could stand on its own, impacted my view on it. In this passage, it’s ending the chapter and is concluding what true war is really about. O’Brian uses simple language yet, powerful words to make his point. He describes war as love, memory, sorrow, sisters, and bad listeners. What he says impacts readers and opens their eyes about the true meaning of war. No it’s not about fighting and being a better self...it’s about conquering fears, loving you fellow soldiers who become brothers, remember those who have past and yet, keeping them in your hearts. It’s about remembering that everyone is not going to understand what war is like, and what it is to be a soldier, and how soldiers deserve respect. O’Brian creates a meaningful ending that summarizes what war truly means and what it’s like going through war. It’s beautiful, in the way he describes war throughout the chapter and how war is not moral and war is about love. War stories are never about war is his theme throughout the chapter and he ends with it as well by saying, :...a true war story is never about war…” and then he goes on to say his final thoughts on the true meaning of war.
In any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself. When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed" (O'Brien 3).
ReplyDeleteO’Brien is trying to communicate to the readers the difficulty of truthfully telling a true war story. The way events remembered may not be exactly how they really happened, but it’s how they exactly remember it. At one point the narrator is told a story by Sanders and although he swears everything is true, he later admits he added certain details. This and the passage demonstrate the problems had by those trying to tell a story as it it happened when they can’t remember how it honestly happened. Especially in war, one can’t keep their eyes on the action. the narrator talks about looking away when the booby trap went off. People are more focused on protecting themselves than others. When something happens, they want to make sure they will be safe, i.e. looking away from the explosion, before seeing what happened to the others. The troops don’t necessarily want to watch the horrific things that happen to the others but, like is mentioned later, it’s impossible to look away. The small details are what make the stories seem fake but it’s the little things that make the stories real. Often the truth is impossible to truly know because people’s views can be so different. It’s like vision; the left eye sees one thing and the right sees a slightly different vision. Independently, these images aren’t technically “true” to how things are, but when put together you can get a sense of the truth.
From The Things They Carried:
ReplyDelete“How do you generalize?
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. War is nasty; war is fun. War is thrilling; war is drudgery. War makes you a man; war makes you dead.
The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat. You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. You crouch in ambush as a cool, impassive moon rises over the nighttime paddies You admire the fluid symmetries of troops on the move, the harmonies of sound and shape and proportion, the great sheets of metalfire streaming down from a gunship, the illumination rounds, the white phosphorus, the purply orange glow of napalm, the rocket’s red glare. It’s not pretty, exactly. It’s astonishing. It fills the eye. It commands you. You hate it, yes, but your eyes do not. Like a killer forest fire, like cancer under a microscope, any battle or bombing raid or artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference--a powerful, implacable beauty--and a true war story will tell the truth about this, though the truth is ugly.
To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life.”
To start this passage off, the speaker asks a question. “How do you generalize?” This sets the reader up to begin to generalize what war is. For most, war is not something experienced firsthand. It is something that has been told to us through stories from moms, dads, uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins, etc. The posing of this rhetorical question is answered in a roundabout way through the juxtapositions that follow. War cannot be generalized because it is just too complicated. The syntax in this passage is very important and helps to illustrate that point. O’Brien writes, “War is hell...war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love.” This creates one long list of some of the things that war is. By repeating the word “and” the author emphasizes the fact that war cannot be summed up by one word. The usage of semicolons also is important for syntax. The semicolons separate the juxtapositions that war presents and also sets up conduplicatio to be used in the passage as well.
ReplyDeleteConduplicatio is a device used for repetition in which the key word or words in one phrase, clause, or sentence is/are repeated at or very near the beginning of successive sentences, clauses, or phrases (definition from http://www.americanrhetoric.com/figures/conduplicatio.htm). In the context of this passage, the key word is “war” and its repetition is used in order to clearly show the reader that war cannot be pinned down by just one adjective. It also associates an underlying feeling of heaviness to associate with war. In each sentence that uses a semicolon, war is repeated twice. In the first half of the sentence, war is one thing, while in the next half of the sentence after the semicolon, war is that first thing juxtaposed. For example, “War is nasty; war is fun.” War is nasty because it leaves bloodstains on the hands of soldiers, but war is fun because it provides opportunity for entertainment and thrills like when Rat and Lemon were playing the innocent game before Lemon was killed. War is brutal and terrifying and ugly, but there is also an “awful majesty [in] combat.”
This passage matters because it allows for its reader to better understand war and to have an open mind about what war is and all that it entails. One of the most powerful parts, in my opinion, within this passage is when O’Brien alludes to the National Anthem when he uses the phrase “the rocket’s red glare” in describing some of the beautiful things about war. This is so powerful because it shows the undying patriotism within the soldier. O’Brien also writes, “that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life,” and while some readers may refuse to accept the beauty within war, they must remember that these soldiers, while always facing the possibility of death, are also choosing to see beauty within their surroundings on deployment.
From How to Tell a True War Story: "Then he took a peculiar half step, moving from shade into the bright sunlight, and the booby-trapped 105 round blew him into a tree. The parts were just hanging there, so Dave Jensen and I were ordered to shinny up and peel him off. I remember the white bone of an arm. I remember pieces of skin and something wet and yellow that must’ve been the intestines. The gore was horrible and stays with me. But what makes me up twenty years later is Dave Jensen singing 'Lemon Tree' as we threw down the parts."
ReplyDeleteThe unbelievable imagery and ordinary punctuation embedded in this paragraph from Tim O’Brien’s novel is what makes this quote so powerful. In this paragraph, O’Brien writes about his friend, Curt Lemon, being killed from a booby-trapped 105. Not only does O’Brien incorporate the gore of war with details such as “the white bone of an arm,” but he uses a nonchalant tone, which makes the paragraph haunt the reader. Specifically the last line of this paragraph when O’Brien recalls Jensen singing “Lemon Tree” as he threw down the disassembled parts from the tree is the most graphic use of imagery I have ever read. This sentence stood out to me the most because the idea of a man singing, an act which is usually associated with happiness (especially the fact that “Lemon Tree” by Peter, Paul, and Mary is an upbeat song from that time era), while throwing down body parts of his friend that just got blown up is mind-boggling. The fact that Jensen was singing while doing this shows how death has become so ordinary to these young soldiers while at war- that these young men have almost even become immune to it. The ordinary punctuation of this paragraph also helps exhibit the nonchalant tone of O’Brien. In this paragraph, and almost in the entire chapter, O’Brien uses only periods. Using periods instead of other punctuations, such as exclamation points, creates a calm and casual tone, which is rare for a war story.
The nonchalant tone shown through the use of graphic imagery and ordinary punctuation is important because it supports one of O’Brien’s many important ideas: whether physically or mentally, war kills.
ReplyDeleteHow To Tell a True War Story: “Often in a true war story there is not even a point, or else the point doesn’t hit you until twenty years later, in your sleep, and you wake up and shake your wife and start telling the story to her, except when you get to the end you’ve forgotten the point again. And then for a long time you lie there watching the story happen in your head. You listen to your wife’s breathing. The war’s over. You close your eyes. You smile and think, Christ, what’s the point?” (O’Brien)
The narrator's informal and casual conversation-like tone creates a safe space for honesty to blossom. There is no questioning of the narrator's motives, nor judgement of conclusions the audience may draw through the text. Direct language forms an indirect answer to the rhetorical question posed. The question creates a pause, and the audience is able to imply their conclusions from the path that the narrator lead them down. The rhetorical question also allows for the audience to relate with (but not quite fully understand) the struggles of war and the deep emotional struggle it started.
The anaphora of “you” is broken by the interjecting sentence, “The war’s over.” Attention is drawn to this sentence to set up a scene for this rhetorical question to flourish in. This short sentence also creates a break from the paragraph thus drawing more attention to it. The war’s over. It is a simple truth, yet it is filled with the narrator’s emotions about the war such as regret, guilt, confusion and other complex and clashing feelings. The war’s over, but the tension it created is not. The battle on the field turns into a battle in the head.
“We came across a baby VC water buffalo. What it was doing there I don't know-no farms or paddies- but we chased it down and got a rope around it and led it along to a deserted village where we sat up for the night. After supper Rat Kiley went over and stroked its nose.
ReplyDeleteHe opened up a can of C rations, pork and beans, but the baby buffalo wasn’t interested.
Rat shrugged
He stepped back and shot it through the right front knee. The animal did not make a sound. It went down, then got up again, and Rat took careful aim and shot off an ear. He shot it in the hindquarters and in the little hump at its back. He shot it twice in the flanks. It wasn’t to kill; it was to hurt. He put the rifle muzzle up against the mouth and shot the mouth. Nobody said much. The whole platoon stood there watching, feeling all kinds of things, but there wasn’t a great deal of pity for the baby water buffalo. Curt Lemon was dead. Rat Kiley had lost his best friend in the world. Later in the week he would write a long personal letter to the guy’s sister, who would not write back, but for now it was a question of pain.”
This passage was one that I felt was very powerful because not only did it have the brief, yet careful description of what Rat Kiley did to the water buffalo, but it also shed light on the intense emotional state of the characters after the traumatic death they just experienced hours before. The way the author depicts the situation and describes the actions taken is what really kept me hooked on this passage. It’s not just about the way Rat Kiley took “careful aim” at the water buffalo’s ear before he shot it off, it’s also about why he would even bother to pick on this animal. This text was very straight to the point, it didn’t use a huge vocabulary, but it didn’t need it. The author’s very direct, cut and dry diction to me is what helped it feel like a war story. A war story in my opinion shouldn't have extra fluff or filler words, it should stay true to the straight facts of the situation, and I feel that O’brien does a really great job at this. The repetition of phrases like “he shot” or the way the water buffalo would continue to stand up time and time again after being shot starts to show the reader the emotional toll taken on the soldiers and how the war was affecting them. The emotional aspect of this passage is why it matters! Rat Kiley did not shoot the water buffalo to kill it, he was merely using the little buffalo as a way to express his anger and complete devastation after the death of his best friend Curt Lemon. Also the water buffalo symbolizes the way that no matter what challenges the soldiers face, they will always have to endure and trudge forward until they die because that is essentially the only choice they have.
How to Tell a True War Story: “To generalize the war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps war is just another name for death, 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 firefight, 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).
ReplyDeleteThis paragraph reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, “you got to take the good with the bad, smile with the sad, love what you got, and remember what you had.” I feel as if this quote along with this paragraph really explains what O’Brien says about war throughout his piece. In order to maintain your sanity while at war, you must find the beauty behind the blows. O’Brien uses the juxtaposition of a firefight and beauty to show this theme, and illustrate how soldiers need to take a step back to appreciate this beauty. Recognizing that you are alive amongst the death creates a calming sense to the soldiers, and helps them to stay alive, physically and mentally.
From How to Tell a True War Story: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true war story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil. Listen to Rat Kiley. Cooze, he says. He does not say bitch. He certainly does not say woman, or girl. He says cooze. Then he spits and stares. He’s nineteen years old- it’s too much for him- so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes and says cooze, because his friend is dead, because it’s so incredibly sad and true; she never wrote back.”
ReplyDeleteIn this passage it describes what makes a war story a true one. The author uses the repetition of the words “moral”, “virtue”, and the phrase “war story” many times in the passage. By doing so the author is emphasising the point that war stories are not moral and do not hold virtue. They are raw and uncensored, they involve obscenity and often times are not the kind of heroic stories that the people want to hear. The author also gives the reader great imagery when he states “so he looks at you with those big sad gentle killer eyes…” by wording that like this it emphasises the point that Rat, even though a soldier and a killer, still has innocent eyes and his overall being is still a child. Thus making the fact that his friend died right in front of him that much more emotional. To have a friend that dies in a moment when it is least expected is a hard thing to deal with. And then to write a heartfelt letter to their sister just so that they can not reply would be a tough situation for a nineteen year old. Thus what the beginning of the paragraph was discussing. Rat’s reaction is not going to be uplifting and motivational but instead it is going to include cursing and profanities. The reason that this matters is because it solidifies the fact that often what is heard about war is not true. It shows that the truth is not just the bravery of a soldier risking their lives for their country but that the real war is filled with stories no one wants to hear.
From How to Tell a True War Story: “A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue. As a first rule of thumb, therefore, you can tell a true story by its absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil"
ReplyDeleteThis passage in particular is powerful, due to the fact it is void of any human feeling or emotion. O’Brien is very direct with his word choice and is brief in sentence structure. Words such as, “moral”, “virtue” and “rectitude” are repeated several times throughout the paragraph, emphasizing their importance, or lack thereof. These words are repeated, because they have no place in a true war story. The sentence structure of this paragraph is also something to keep in mind, while considering O'Brien's message. The sentences themselves contain few words. This brevity helps convey O’Brien’s simple message; there is no point to war. This combination of diction and sentence structure are employed to reiterate the pointlessness of war.
Here Tim O’Brien is debating the truth of a heroic war story. By stating that the reader would feel “cheated if it never happened” O’Brien attempts to establish a connection with the reader by predicting their reaction. This gives the reader the idea that they are being instructed as allowing him to further his explanation. He then uses the phrase “grounding reality” to show the reader a sense of attachment must be established between the story and reality, like an anchor if it is ever to be believed. O’Brien then reveals that a fake war story would be relinquished into the vein of Hollywood as a entertaining, larger than life, spectacle meant mainly for entertainment if its deceit was discovered. The story begins to lack any notion of importance or higher meaning rendering it an amalgamation of ideas meant for the box office. Not to mention, the legitimacy of a war story does not follow the same restrictions of reality. He uses the paradox like phrase,” another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth,” to show the reader the whole story is not always preached, because how can something never happen and still abide with the truest existent of the idea called truth unless it occurred but was never told. The author then uses the example of an entire group of soldiers perishing due to an inescapable blast radius from a grenade to show that harshest portents of war are lost in its midst. With all of the constituents of the story dying in a irrefutably fatal fashion that defies what could be considered a great act of comradery, the man jumping on the grenade to save the remainder of his group, forces the reader to understand how the truth could be lost if no one is left to tell it, and the ambiguity of the whole story in war ceases to be such an abstract concept that the reader must discern for themselves.
ReplyDeleteThe Importance of Tim O’Brien’s remarks about the validity of a war story shows the uncertainty of war itself. Not only can the truth can the truth be muddled as those that live to tell it try to avoid danger, but the danger may altogether erase any shred of the truth. The connotation of war is a grim spectacle that breeds death and decay. Yet, the stories we hear are from an outside party rendering the truth often unfinished. It may be due to maintaining moral that the death of this group of soldiers is never told, or perhaps the story was covered up by nature itself. Often the truth may not even matter as the symbolism behind the tale is the motivation of the orator, not its history. The reader must remember to consider that every story could be a lie, a half truth, and a real event that was never completely unearthed. What is told cannot always be received as the only inherit truth as the fog of war engulfs everything in war itself.
The Yellow Birds, Page 1.
ReplyDelete“The war tried to kill us in the spring. As grass greened the plains of Nineveh and the weather warmed, we patrolled the low-slung hills beyond the cities and towns. We moved over them and through the tall grass on faith, kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers. While we slept, the war rubbed its thousand ribs against the ground in prayer. When we pressed onward through exhaustion, its eyes were white and open in the dark. While we ate, the war fasted, fed by its own deprivation. It made love and gave birth and spread through fire.”
With the first line, the passage had my attention. Usually, spring is associated with good times, and rebirth. In this passage, it refers to death. The author used the contrast of spring with his experiences to show just how bad the war was. He compared the beauty of spring, i.e. green grass with the tall grass they had to plow through to get places. The author also used simile and metaphors to compare the two sides. “kneading paths into the windswept growth like pioneers” and “its eyes were white and open in the dark”. What does it mean? This passage wants to convey the hardship of war. It shows the reader the opposite of spring, which makes us think dark, depressing, despair. The author wants us to feel devastated because that is what war is- devastation. It matters because the war kills the most innocent of things, above all, your soul. It wreaks havoc in a soldier’s life, and tears them apart. That is what the author wants us to understand, that lives are ruined during war and war is the cause for disaster. When we realize that, we want to prevent the war from ever happening again. Think about it this way, if we ever have a World War III, no one would be alive to tell about it. Once nuclear weapons get involved, which they will if World War III happens, it would be over and we would literally blow each other off the planet. The author sends his message so that we, the next generation, understand his words and stop the atrocity from ever happening.
“Twenty years later, I can still see the sunlight on Lemon’s face. I can see him turning, looking back at Rat Kiley, then he laughed and took that curious half step from shade into sunlight, his face suddenly brown and shining, and when his foot touched down, in that instant, he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him. It was not the sunlight. It was a rigged 105 round. But if I could ever get the story right, how the sun seemed to gather around him and pick him up and lift him high into a tree, if I could somehow recreate the fatal whiteness of that light, the quick glare, the obvious cause and effect, then you would believe the last thing Curt Lemon believed, which for him must’ve been the final truth" (O'Brien)
ReplyDeleteO’Brien, with descriptive imagery, takes a mundane image – a person taking a step and getting blown up – and frames it, capturing it in slow motion, accentuating its surreal beauty.
The use of the phrase “I can still see” imparts a sense of distance and a slow passage of time; The phrase “the sunlight on Lemon’s face” shifts our focus to Lemon’s face as a setup so that for all subsequent phrases, such as “looking back at Rat Kiley,” “he laughed,” “his face suddenly brown and shining,” and “he must’ve thought it was the sunlight that was killing him,” we see those phrases in relation to Lemon’s face. Since faces and facial expressions are the most emotional and humanly relatable aspects of a person, this shift of focus humanizes Lemon, and allows us to connect with him, feeling his movements and thoughts. When Lemon is described as laughing, we see his face laughing. When he’s turning, we see the turning of his face and the sunlight illuminating it. And when he sees the flash of light, we imagine his face as his vision is engulfed by whiteness. This connection to Lemon helps us sympathize with him and Rat Kiley – sympathy is the closest thing to a “moral” in this instance of the story.
Then there’s the light. It pervades the entire paragraph, first appearing as “sunlight on Lemon’s face,” then illuminating Lemon’s entire body as he steps “from shade into sunlight,” then illuminating his face so that it’s “brown and shining,” then, as a “fatal whiteness… quick glare,” gathering around Lemon and picking him up into the tree. The light gives the passage its surreal, pure atmosphere. Lemon is a pure-hearted, innocent kid, and he’s killed by a quick flash of the same whiteness which illuminates him like an angel.
This symbolic, almost fictional imagery supports the themes concerning truth: a war story’s truth doesn’t matter. What matters is the idea of a kid such as Lemon dying in such a way; what sounds crazy, with all the sunlight, is often truer than what sounds believable; and the truth is whatever the observer saw. To the narrator, the truth is that the 105 round killed Lemon, but to Lemon, the truth that he died with was that sunlight killed him.
The path they made was marked in blood: from the car smoking ablaze, through a courtyard ringed by hyacinths, to the place where the woman lay dead, attended by the small child, who rocked and moved her lips, perhaps singing some desert elegy that I couldn't hear.
ReplyDeleteThis paragraph uses the run on sentence to convey the soldier's frantic feelings. Everything seems to be happening so fast, so he describes the events in one long cluster of a sentence. He adds the description first, setting the scene with the path "marked in blood." It ends with his speculation of the girl singing a song that he "couldn't hear." It was not the fact that distance made it hard to hear, or even that the song was in a different language; the solider could not hear her because he can not empathize with her. Her song was a reflection of herself, her innocence, and the soldier realizes this last. He was the murderer, and this passage shows how the physical events eventually seeped into the soldier's consciousness and guilt.