One of my goals for 2018 is to read more. Though
I’ve been only vaguely successful so far, one novel that I’ve read recently
comes to mind.
The Things They Carried is a compilation of short stories written by Tim O’brien, spanning
the life of the author in a work of metafiction, wherein the author and the
narrator often become one and the same. The work deals with the Vietnam War and
its aftermath. However, there are no “Saving Private Ryan”-esque scenes of
blood and gore. The short stories, poignant and achronological, together patch
together a quilt of what daily life might’ve been for a soldier in the war.
Here are two of my favorite passages from the book:
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 you 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 (O’brien 77).
In this paragraph, O’brien opens with two
parallel statements: “Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true.” This
parallelism repeats itself through the paragraph to bring war and death as well
as peace and fiction close together so that O’brien and the reader may compare
them. Parallelism in the sentences regarding proximity to life and death
represent the thin boundary between the two; O’brien reflects his words’
meaning in their structure and arrangement.
Furthermore, he repeats the phrase “you want”
several times, contrasting a curt sentence of “You want decency” with the
polysyndeton of the following sentence, highlighting the list of things that a
soldier desires in a war, and which the rest of the novel reveals as what
actually happens in a war. His three-word sentence of “You want decency”
underscores the idea that all of the other short stories in The Things They
Carried show that there is no decency or fairness, that such a huge
disparity exists between what the soldiers wish the war were and what it
actually is. O’brien’s polysyndeton represents the enormous list of things the
soldiers wish they had: and and and signifies the endless quality of the things
they desire.
O’brien also employs irony in his oxymoronic
statement: “You’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead”, which serves
to again underscore the interconnected relationship between life and death. In
the final sentence of the quote, O’brien juxtaposes the “fine colors” of the
earth and his wonder and awe at the land with the death and indecency and
violence and cruelty of the war. He depicts beauty and pain as two sides of the
same coin: in the war, in the face of such terrible things, soldiers recognize
the beauty surrounding them, because without that proximity to cruelty and
death, they cannot realize how close they are to life. O'brien brings both life
and death as well as beauty and ugliness together here in a loose sentence to
emphasize the rambling nature of a soldier's thoughts, long winded and
meandering as the soldier wonders about the effects of the war.
On a personal note, this paragraph also reminds
me of an article I recently read about free-drivers. Biologically speaking,
there isn’t a way for people to free-dive (the definition of which is swimming
to an extreme depth underwater without help from any kind of breathing
apparatus) beyond depths of around 100 meters. From a strictly factual
perspective, past that depth, scientists understood that divers’ lungs would be
crushed.
And yet the divers have survived and thrived in
these depths -- because of mindset and mentality. According to such divers,
their drive and their grit pushes them past this physical barrier. According to
such divers, coming back from a diver and taking a breath of air again feels
like breathing for the first time, like being reborn.
Here is the second passage from The Things
They Carried:
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 ot
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 take a feeble swipe in the
dark and think, Christ, what’s the point? …
I’ll picture Rat Kiley’s face, his grief, and I’ll think, You
dumb cooze.
Because she wasn’t listening.
It wasn’t a war
story. It was a love story.
But you can’t say that. All you can do is tell it one more time,
patiently, adding and subtracting, making up a few things to get at the real
truth. No Mitchell Sanders, you tell her. No Lemon, no Rat Kiley. No trail
junction. No baby buffalo. No vines or moss or white blossoms. Beginning to
end, you tell her, it’s all made up. Every goddamn detail -- the mountains and
the river and especially that poor dumb baby buffalo. None of it happened. None
of it. And even if it did happen, it didn’t happen in the mountains, it happened
in this little village on the Batangan Peninsula, and it was raining like
crazy, and one night a guy named Stink Harris woke up screaming with a leech on
his tongue. You can tell a true war story if you just keep on telling it.
And in the end, of course, a true war story is never about the
war. It’s about the sunlight. It’s about the special war 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
(O’brien 79).
O’brien’s poignant imagery from this passage in
the “How to Tell a True War Story” vignette foreshadows the way readers may
reflect upon his stories in the future: he employs the second person to better
emphasize the notion that any individual who has listened to a war story may
wake up in the middle of the night, some years later, to reflect upon those
events. In this passage, O’brien notes that it isn’t the specifics of a war
story that make it evocative: his demonstration of the happening-truth being
fictional -- he claims that there was “no Lemon, no Rat Kiley… it [was] all
made up” -- underscores the fact that the story does not need to be true in
order for it to be poignant (79). His statement that a “true war story is never
about the war” suggests that the relevance of a war story lies not with the
happening-truth or the historical facts, but instead with the emotions: “love
and memory… sorrow,” and the tenacity of soldiers who view a beautiful dawn but
must still “do things [they] are afraid to do” (80).
Though this passage takes place early on in the
novel, in retrospect, O’brien insinuates that even if none of the events in his
novel happened, it does not matter, because maybe it happened somewhere -- and
the emotions that he and his soldiers felt were real. O’brien claims that the
war is less about fighting and violence and more about people and how people
can change or adapt to survive.
In the context of the novel as a whole, this
passage is an explanation on behalf of O’brien to his audience, sharing his
justification as to why he has changed such details and events in his book, as
he readily admits in later chapters. The tendency of metafiction to blur the
line between narrator and author comes into play here as O’brien defends
himself in a way: he vindicates his warping of facts and his ambiguity in
writing because he believes that it won’t matter which way he imparts the
emotions. To him, the emotions are the story, and he hopes that these emotions
and thoughts -- though the reader may not exactly know what they mean -- will
resonate. And to some extent, that indescribable quality of a war story -- its
ability to evoke such complex emotions and force you to wonder why? and “what’s
the point?” -- reflects some part of the human condition, the unknowable aspect
of life (like the mystery and tenacity of free-drivers, to name only one
example) that, if known, would make the magic go away.
Sources:
“Scientists still don’t understand how
freedivers can survive such crushing depths”
The Things They Carried, Tim O’brien.
A vast expanse of land, colorless. Stretching
across the horizon, as big as the sky.
When I first watched the movie, I realized that
they don’t make movies the same way today: Lawrence is slow, heavy on
dramatic landscape shots and succinct dialogue. There’s some quality of older
films that’s unique: maybe the way people talk (which, by the way, I looked up
and it’s this thing called the Mid-Atlantic accent, some weird synthesis of
both British and American speech used primarily in Hollywood in the 20th
century), the honey-slow and leisurely pace of sequences, or the long, drawn-out
sprawl of the film itself. 
One of the main characters of Prometheus
is this humanoid robot, David, who is obsessed with Lawrence of Arabia.
David, like Lawrence, is caught in a no-man’s land: David is not completely
human, but not entirely robot either, something like a shell which knows that
it is empty; and Lawrence is no longer an Englishman when he travels to war,
but is not truly an Arab either. Both are caught between two worlds, never
quite fitting in -- a familiar, recurring theme in many movies.
