Final Blog

This book hit me in a few different ways. At first I thought it was pretty decent, hearing a few war stories. Definitely an improvement from the last book. However, then I found out that all of these stories at best are grossly exaggerated and probably mostly fake. This really set me off in a bad way. I don't think that he should need to make up the stories and sure maybe some people will say that we need to read into the fact that they're made up and analyze them. Really though, I hate over analyzing literature. I think that analyzing it is fine but I think there comes a point when you begin to read too far into the literature and trying to see connections that just aren't really there.

221-233

O'Brien relates the story back to the man in Vietnam in a very effective way. He says they have to joke about death and follows this up with a few euphemisms. He says, “And so a VC nurse, fried by napalm, was a crispy critter. A Vietnamese baby, which lay nearby, was a roasted peanut.” I have heard similar stories to these in which at first the soldiers come off as careless and insensitive but in the end are proven to just be trying to cope with the horrible atrocities going on around them. I think that the story about Linda and how he says he should have stopped the boy from pulling off her hat so that he would have had a little practice of courage for Vietnam at first seems like a joke but may in fact be true. Sure the two situations are very different but I think that as a nine year old in that class room it would have been almost as hard to stand up and stop him then as it would be to do some of the things he has to do in Vietnam.

Pgs: 213-221

I think it's interesting how this story is told. He talks of his first date, and true love and then you find out they were only nine. He talks about how he went on a double date and then you find out it was with his parents. Most importantly, I think, hes told this story and that she died but we still haven't found out how she died. The point of this story is to console the fresh new soldier, O'Brien. He is really comparing this little nine year old girl who died to an old man in Vietnam. It is almost a stretch to compare the two but it justifies the mans experience with painful death. Perhaps now that he has given himself some credibility he will attempt to use it to console the grieving O'Brien. It is also a little funny how he builds things up as if there was going to be a very important moment but then there isn't like when he says, “Nine years old, yes but it was real love, and now we were alone on those front steps. Finally we looked at each other. 'Bye,' I said. Linda nodded and said, 'Bye .'”

195-212

From here on out I am just going to assume the stories are true because if I don't then I just keep wanting to rant about the pointlessness of it all. Kiley says at one point, “This whole war. You Know what it is? Just one big banquet. Meat, man. You and me. Everybody. Meat for the bugs.” (212) I think the way this sentence is written shows more of O'Brien's [SYNTACTIC FLUENCY.] Kiley is going crazy and O'Brien has to show us this, not just tell us. He does this very effectively by making his speech very choppy and almost random. It shows the randomness of his thoughts and his paranoia. The sentences are all appropriately short and simple because Kiley isn't having any long, complex thoughts. The moral of this story, I think, is just to demonstrate how much pressure soldiers are put under. Even now with soldiers still over in Iraq we hear about soldiers going kind of crazy. It's a serious problem.

181-194

In this section O'Brien incorporates a bit of [FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE]. When describing the new medic, Bobby Jorgenson. He says, “He was green and incompetent and scared.” If you interpret literally that he is “green” it doesn't quite come off the way it is intended. Green is a term used to describe someone who is new to something. A lot of times I've heard the phrase green horn to describe a first year worker for many jobs. I'm pretty sure it is derived from plants and the fact that if you have say wood that is green then it is very fresh. Here it isn't extremely important or particularly helpful it just helps to get the point that O'Brien is making across more effectively.

Pgs: 165- 180

I know that I've already written about it a little but I just read a chapter where O'Brien basically told us that all of his stories are made up. I liked this book until I read this. If all of the stories are fake then why am I reading them? My six year old cousin can make up crazy stories! He says stories can “make things present” (172) I just can't really take anything away from a made up war story. In fact, earlier in the book he wrote a chapter entitled “How to Tell a True War Story” . . .WHAT?!?! what is this? Why is he trying to play these stories off as true in the beginning? Maybe because he knows no one would read this if they knew from the beginning it was all made up. I just think that there are true war stories out there that not only, in my opinion are more interesting, but also have a purpose.

Pgs: 155-165

This chapter continues to talk about the mud and the death of Kiowa. All of which could be completely made up and therefore, I believe, somewhat pointless to read about. However I found an example of an [ANTHROPOMORPHISM]. It occurs when O'Brien is talking about the sludge. He says, “. . .how the craters then collapsed on themselves and filled up with mud and water, sucking things down, swallowing things. . .” (162) The use of the anthropomorphism here really helps demonstrate the true power of the sludge. Instead of just saying, it sucked things in, O'Brien gives the sludge a human characteristic, the ability to swallow, making it seem almost that it had a mind of its own and therefore illustrating his point much more thoroughly.

Pgs: 149-154

I'm beginning to think I'm missing the point of this book. I just read the chapter about Norman Baker and how he couldn't muster up the courage to save his friend. Then I read the next chapter and it says that part was all made up? I don't understand the point of reading a story that isn't true but pretends to be. I can make up a story that has a valuable lesson and shows courage or the lack there of, but I feel like the moral or point of the story is completely discounted if the story is made up. I just don't get why O'Brien is making stuff up, it sounds like he's just one of those people who catches a blue gill and over time and tellings of the story it becomes a great white shark. He's a liar, in a way. It's not that the story's are bad or even entirely that they are made up, I could deal with that too. I just don't like that he plays them off as real at first and then decides to reveal that he just made it up.

Pgs: 129-148

In this section I read about a man named Norman Baker. It was odd, in my opinion, because the whole chapter was made up and had no basis. It was all about this guy driving around a lake imagining he was telling a story. However, I did find what I think is a [MIXED METAPHOR]. O'Brien says that the town doesn't know shit. After that the focus is returned to Baker and it says, “ He knew shit. It was his specialty. The smell, in particular, but also the numerous varieties of texture and taste. Someday he'd give a lecture on the topic. Put on a suit and tie and stand up in the front of the Kiwanis club and tell the fuckers about all the wonderful shit he knew. Pass out samples, maybe.” (138-9) This metaphor kind of loses me at some points. At first he is talking literally about shit even though before with the town he was just implying the town didn't know anything. I think, however, that at some point he begins to talk about how Norman Baker knew a lot and therefore he is not talking literally about shit again. Despite this shift he still goes back to talking about physical properties of shit that kind of cause the metaphor to become jumbled.

Pgs: 111-128

O'Brien discusses a particular man's sort of superstition and how the man always would put his girlfriends pantyhose around his neck. This unconventional superstition to me seems a bit more crazy and obsessive than cute or anything else. Even further more when his girlfriend breaks up with him and he continues the superstition. I don't think that the pantyhose would really smell as they were described either, this guy has been wearing them around his neck for months in the hot weather. I think they would smell more like sweat. O'Brien also writes about a man he killed. The chapter is titled “The Man I Killed.” It seems a bit odd to me that if these storys are true that he would focus so much on this man unless it is the only man he ever killed. This would be kind surprising to me if he only killed one person during his time in Vietnam, when I think of WW1 and the sheer number of casualties I would have thought he would have killed a few more people than just one. He says at one point, “The young man's finger nails were clean.” This seems to prove to me that he really did only kill one man if he remembers him in that great of detail.

Pgs: 98-110

In this chapter I found a a [SYNECDOTE] that is a little bit off color so I won't go into to much detail explaining it but it is the first that I've seen. Rat Kiley is on a sort of rant and says, “All that crap about how if we had a pussy for a president there wouldn't be no more wars.” (102) I think its fairly obvious what the synecdote is. I also noticed a bit of irony in this chapter. On page 101 O'Brien interrupts a story to talk about how a guy he knew used to stop his story and interrupt them, it is extremely ironic. He talks about how Rat would stop the flow of the story to give a little bit of pointless detail and that is precisely what O'Brien does with his writing here. The whole basis of this chapter is only valid if we assume that a guy actually did bring his girlfriend to Vietnam which in itself is very hard to believe.

Pgs: 85-97

This chapter describes a story O'Brien heard from a guy named Rat Kiley. O'Brien warns that it may not be true but to me, it seems, we get an awful lot of detail considering were hearing this second hand and 20 years later. It makes me think that this story might be true, but I am of course skeptical about all war stories now that O'Brien told me I should be. I also noticed something in the front cover of the book just before I read this chapter. It says, “In prose that combines the sharp, unsentimental rhythms of Hemmingway with gentler, more lyrical descriptions. . .” This struck me as a bit odd, maybe its not as much of a coincidence that we are reading these two books. I think I foresee an essay or two comparing the writing styles of Hemmingway and O'Brien, I can hardly wait.

Pgs: 73-84

O'Brien recalls something he learned in the war, he says, “. . .you're never more alive then when you're almost dead.” This is clearly a [PARADOX] and is used to illustrate an indelible truth, in less words it; essentially explains how we take life for granted and it isn't until we are very near death that we realize how alive we truly are.

Just a few paragraphs later O'Brien shows what I think is a good example of syntactic fluency. He says, “The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity.” This is a very complex type of syntax that corresponds to the complex message it delivers. It is also so complicated because it is explaining that during war everything becomes its opposite. It would seem that all this is impossible and that is why it is so complex and a little bit difficult to fully comprehend.

Pgs: 62-72

The majority of this section falls in the chapter entitled “How to Tell a True War Story.” O'Brien uses a story about how to tell a story to demonstrate the true maliciousness of war. This is almost like a framing device however I don't think it's a true frame story. I think it's interesting how O'Brien decided to do this, it seems almost like that by doing this it makes you, or at least it made me, a little skeptical of all the story's hes telling. How much of them are true? He says, “A true war story is never moral.” This may be true of the story he proceeds to tell, but some of the story's he has told have been moral. So should we discount them and view them as lies like he says we should? This contradiction kind of rubs me the wrong way I don't like that he generalizes this much about the war it makes me more and more skeptical about what he is writing. Despite my reservations I still like the book so far.

Pgs:51-61

O'Brien finishes telling his story about how he ended up deciding to go to war. It seemed like every logical thinking part of his body said that the best thing to do was jump out of the boat and swim to Canada but it was his moral fiber that made him stay, despite his best effort to make himself go.

Next O'Brien writes a chapter entitled “enemies.” This chapter stands to prove the quote by Abraham Lincoln that “a war on two fronts is impossible to win” Although, I'm not exactly sure this is the kind on two fronts war that he had in mind when he said this. This true story really demonstrates the immense amount of pressure put on soldiers in a war and how close to the breaking they really are. I think that that is why O'Brien chose this story to illustrate this truth with.

Pgs: 37-51

O'Brien revealed a story in this chapter that he is not at all proud of. I think that this shows a lot of character, especially since he revealed this story very early in the book. On page 47 O'Brien uses a strong oxymoron, he says that a man had a “ferocious silence.” This [OXYMORON] is very effective because in essence I think that it attempts to describe the indescribable. It causes the reader to stop for a second and imagine what “ferocious silence” is, this contradiction shows us how complex the mans disposition is while also being very contrite. When I imagine the ferocious silence I see it as both O'Brien and the man both knowing why O'Brien is there yet never talking about it, almost forming a tension that is undiscussed and is therefore almost pliable. So far this book is a lot better than The Sun Also Rises, in my opinion, I feel like the story moves a lot better.

Pgs: 18-36

O'Brien doesn't really seem to have any path with his writing. It doesn't seem like there is any main plot or end in sight. He just recalls war story's as he remembers them and then all the sudden he also has a story about talking to someone about war stories. Its not that the stories aren't interesting, the book isn't bad so far, I just like a book with a plot that leaves you on edge and you never want to put it down.

Much of this book is made up of short, [ANECDOTAL] stories. An example would be the one on page 34 when O'Brien calls it a “quick peace story.” He ends the story with a quote from the man the story is about that says, “All that peace, man, it felt so good it hurt. I want to hurt it back.” I think that this demonstrates the general mindset of some of the soldiers who fought in WWI. A lot of them were genuinely patriotic and behind what they were fighting for and knew what they were fighting for. Not that this doesn't still exist today but it seemed to be more so at the time of WWI and WWII.

Pgs: 1-18 Part 2

So far it seems like O'Brien has taken a different approach to starting this story instead of introducing the characters by giving background information up front, he slowly reveals what kind of person they are by telling what they carry.

In another part of this chapter I noticed what I think is called a polysyndentone, however, this is not one of our literary terms I think that it's effectiveness helps to demonstrate O'Brien's [SYNTACTIC FLUENCY]. “But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and the helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest plus the unweighed fear.” (Pg. 6) O'Brien is describing that this guy is scared and because of this he carries a lot more supplies than most. He uses this polysyndentone to stretch out the syntax so that it coincides with the amount of weight that Lavender carried.

Pgs: 1-18

The books title seems very appropriate so far I think that the narrator, Tim O'Brien, takes a very realistic stance when he considers the things they carried. I think it is more realistic because not only does he consider the physical weight which seems to be a very practical way of looking at the physical strain involved in carrying such objects, but he also takes in their sentimental or perhaps life saving characteristics. This comparison contrasts the weight of items versus their usefulness for instance when he talks about the rain ponchos he says, “ With its quilted liner,the poncho weighed almost 2 pounds, but it was worth every ounce.” (Pg. 3)

In this Chapter I noticed a very “text book” [METAPHOR]. “. . .the eyes chilly and somber like the ocean in March. . .” (Pg. 8) This metaphor is effective because it aids in the narrators description of Lieutenant Jimmy Cross and his extreme preoccupation with the girl whom he loves. He uses this very detailed comparison to show just how much of Cross's time is spent thinking about this girl. He says “the ocean in March” but it is also important to remember that this is not spring break in Florida; he's talking about the ocean in New Jersey which is still cold and somewhat desolate in March.