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The Things They Carried

Tim O'Brien
American
Published 1990

Politics | Social/Cultural | Art | Life | Pictures | Links | Glossary | Questions | Group Questions | Secondary Sources

Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3

Transcript to Two Days in October

When reading a longer work such as a novel, it's best to keep track of the page numbers of your annotations on a note card for ready reference.

I suggest keeping track of your annotations based on the questions on the Essay #2 Assignment page and on the topics below:

Truth v. fiction; Courage; Love; Loss; Politics; Day dreams/hallucinations; Repetition; Memory; Grief; Coping

Audio and video we used in class:


Readings

Introduction
Here we begin a look at a different genre -- the novel. And The Things They Carried is a great introduction to this genre because it will seem very familiar after short stories. It's constructed from interconnected stories that cumulatively pack the emotional punch and sustenance of a novel. We'll be looking at the title rather closely: one of the "things" we'll be working is to figure out just what this novel is "about" -- and it isn't just "about" the war.

The Times
Political
Given the contentious nature of American involvement in the war, it's especially important to understand the political background surrounding the war chapters.

In the 50s, the lines between good and evil were clear: America=democracy=good -- Russia/China= communism=evil. The Cold War was at the sub-zero mark, with kids practicing the desk protection system (ducking under their desks for protection when they saw the flash of an explosion), people building bomb shelters in their back yards, and by the early 60s, enemy nukes on our shores (Cuba). This led to an undercurrent of malaise disturbing the seemingly placid facade of the 50s: fear is a powerful drug, often rendering things like reason and morality powerless -- and for all the country-clubs and drive-ins and days at the beach with Biff and Barb, we were very fearful in the fifties.

When Vietnam seemed headed towards communism in the 50s, American political and military leaders grew worried that all of Southeast Asia would gradually succumb to the lure of communism (the Domino Theory). This would mean that the subcontinent of Asia would be, in the "us v. them" vernacular of the time, "lost." While the Geneva Accord (1956) stipulated that free elections were to be held throughout Vietnam to determine its fate, the leader of South Vietnam, Diem, blocked the elections, with the support of the US (both Diem and the US knew that in free elections, the Vietnamese people would vote for unification under a communist rule). The North Vietnamese, tired of waiting for a political solution to the country's division, opted for a military one.

Two years earlier, in 1954 (after the French lost their war [called the Indochina War] in a decisive defeat in Dien Bien Phu), the CIA had begun funding covert operations against North Vietnam (see Gulf of Tonkin above for how we became more directly involved). Since the US had just defended (and tentatively won) a war to defend an Asian country from the evil of communism (South Korea), we were primed to act again to support "national security interests." Of course, one nation's "national security" is another's "war of independence," and we found out rather quickly that not everyone in Vietnam was ready to welcome the smiling face of American democracy with open arms. Our response to this equivocation by Vietnam was simple: as one US military official said regarding a Vietnamese hamlet that had been reduced to charred, smoking ruins by a napalm strike: "we had to destroy the village in order to save it."

The narrator's induction and service in the army occur in 1968, a year which marks a turning point in American politics. Four major events occurred that year: the Tet Offensive; the assassination of Martin Luther King; the assassination of Robert Kennedy; and the Democratic Convention in Chicago. The Tet Offensive, attacks by the North Vietnamese throughout South Vietnam (including the American Embassy in Saigon) during the Vietnamese New Year (Tet) celebrations, weakened support for the war among citizens at home. Our officials had been framing the war as a "wrap up" operation with the enemy on the run. When film of the attacks, including summary executions (see below) and US soldiers cowering behind walls within the embassy in Saigon, was beamed into living rooms in full color, many Americans finally began to see that there was a disjunct between what the military said about the war, and what was actually occurring on the ground. And this interpretation is not just idle peacenik speculation: as the publication of the Pentagon Papers revealed in 1971 and as then Secretary of War Robert McNamara has more recently revealed in a self-serving mea culpa memoir (In Retrospect, 1996), much of what the government reported to the American people about the war were, to be blunt, lies.

South Vietnamese National Police Chief Brig Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon at the height of Tet (1968). This photo and the film of the execution considerably weakened American support for the war.
(AP Photo/Eddie Adams)

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_LBRoOF0MNW0/TKY5xL_mS3I/AAAAAAAAAXY/z3emCVqpQSg/s1600/eddie_adams_vietcong.jpg
Click to enlarge

The assassination of Martin Luther King touched off rioting in most major US cities, and (sadly -- why is it that someone has to be martyred to move people?) probably ensured the success (such as it was/is) of the civil rights movement. The rioting led to an increased police/military presence -- a student of mine recalled going to work every morning in Northern Jersey with armored personnel carriers rumbling in the streets -- which fed the general feeling of unease started by the Tet Offensive. 

Still, there was the hope of "doveish" political leaders, like Bobby Kennedy, who had changed from a "hawkish" view of the war in his brother's administration, to a more reconciliatory approach towards the conflict. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan ended this faint ray of hope with a handgun in a Los Angeles hotel. The photo on the right shows Kennedy being comforted by a busboy.http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Rfk_assassination.jpg

The brutal police suppression of demonstrations outside the Democratic Convention in Chicago -- broadcast to the nation at large -- showed a nation at war with itself, and the violence unwittingly became associated with the Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey, insuring Nixon's election as president.

The cumulative effect of these events meant that O'Brien and, of course, the nation faced a society in flux, a time when accepted political values and beliefs were being challenged; we had moved from the paternalism of Eisenhower to the "what you can do for your country" of Kennedy, but had yet to agree on what to "do."

The aftermath of the war, which help shape the narrator's thoughts, included a curtailment of the enlightened ideals of President's Johnson's "Great Society" (circa 1964-68) -- freedom from poverty, illiteracy, etc. -- which were compromised by the costs of the war effort. Money that could/should have been used to counter social ills was spent financing the war (final cost, 1 trillion dollars). And of course, the political backlash against military actions and fear of causalities has changed America's foreign and military policy. We're more wary of incursions into other territories for fear of body bags (notice how quickly we exited Somalia after "Black Hawk Down"), and rely now on "Smart Bombs" and other ordnance instead of soldiers on the ground. Unfortunately, one of the main "lessons" our government has learned from the war is to control information and to spread misinformation (no more reporters tagging along in helicopters to send compromising footage back home to the folks in Peoria).

And then, of course, there's the rhyming of history: here we are, four decades (and counting) after the end of the Vietnam war, and we're still trying to bring democracy to other foreign lands at the point of a gun.

Social/Cultural
The events in the novel occur against a background of liberation: Women's Rights, Civil Rights, youth rights . . . in other words, a time of change. The various constituencies agitating for change were responding to the 50s (cf. Modernist's response to the repression of the 19th century), a time of drive-ins, stay-at-home moms, and a conservative government embodied by Dwight Eisenhower. In the 50s, if you were different, you were a beatnik and your opinions were marginalized. If you protested too strongly, you could find yourself labeled a communist (remember, the temperature of the Cold War was around zero at this time), and find yourself out of a job (McCarthyism). This was a time when God, Guns and Guts ruled the land: the words "under God" were inserted in the Pledge of Allegiance in the 50s, and Westerns (white man with a revolver and courage saves the world) were all the rage. But the war years of the novel takes place in the interim period, when America was making the change from Leave it to Beaver to Laugh-In (which was, if you aren't familiar with it, a politicized Saturday Night Live).

Yet while many agitated for change, there were some -- who Nixon mistakenly labeled "the silent majority" -- who wanted things to remain the same. Think of it as Levitt town v. Haight Asbury -- hard hats v. egg heads (note that the segregationist George Wallace was a candidate for president in 1968). And that last contrast gets at an essential part of the debate of the war -- and of American culture in general: anti-intellectualism. Consider the loci of the protests: college campuses. For those in favor of the war, the problem with the protesters was that they thought too much. Joseph E. Sintoni, a soldier who later died in the war, wrote to his fiancee' "The press, the television screen, the magazines are filled with the images of young men burning their draft cards to demonstrate their courage. Their rejection is of the ancient law that a male fights to protect his own people and his own land" (252). He adds "We must do the job God set down for us. It's up to every American to fight for the freedom we hold so dear. We must instruct the young in the ways of these great United States"(252). Joseph represents the Levitt town approach to war -- God, Guns and Guts. The ideals of the Haight can be found in Mark Rudd's open letter to his college president, Grayson Kirk, of Columbia University: "We do have a vision of the way things could be: how the tremendous resources of our economy could be used to eliminate want, how people in other countries could be free from your domination, how a university could produce knowledge for progress, not waste, consumption, and destruction . . . . how men could be free to keep what they produce, to enjoy peaceful lives, to create" (248). These two competing visions were at the root of American views of the war and its causes -- and the catalyst for much of the internal strife.

Of course, I'm painting a rather rigid dichotomy. Many Americans rejected Sintoni's jingoism just as they objected to Rudd's idealism. And there were many who, I'm sure, really could care less as long as the Dodgers still played and the Milwaukee's' Best still flowed. Sad, isn't it, how some things never change.

For a "you are there" perspective, read Don Duncan's "The Whole Thing Was a Lie!," a serviceman and participant's take on the Vietnam war. This is an edited version: see me for the entire essay.

It's important to note that, contrary to the stereotype of Vietnam veterans as seething cauldrons of repressed anger ready to explode at a moment's notice, most veterans readjusted to civilian life as well as veterans of previous wars. Yet serving in Vietnam was a different experience from previous war. For one thing, soldiers were not assigned for the duration of the conflict: soldiers only had to serve 365 days of combat duty, and then were rotated out of country (as opposed to "in-country"). This abbreviated service meant that soldiers did not have the opportunity to form the lasting attachments to others in their units that would help provide emotional support -- and a sense of continuity. Additionally, the alien country and culture lead to a disorienting feeling, as did the nature of guerrilla warfare (where your enemy could be the smiling woman selling you mangoes). And of course, some soldiers faced a hostile reception upon returning home. These all contributed to the post traumatic stress syndrome suffered by some veterans. This wasn't a new disease -- it's simply a label for an affliction that has affected soldiers for centuries upon their return to civilian life.

The Arts
Two broad movements form the aesthetic background to this novel: the surrealism of the 60s, and the post-modernism of contemporary literature. Surrealism adds a hallucinatory quality to a work of fiction, the prose equivalent of the swirling washes of color and stream of consciousness imagery of the psychedelic posters (and those mind-bending Grateful Dead and Allman Brother's album covers) from the 60s and 70s. Yet the surrealism on display in the novel isn't merely a period piece; it's our old friend the unconscious, the Id, showing up again to topple the existing order. It's a method of conveying the often tortured and tortuous mental landscape of a mind in conflict with itself.

The Post-modern aspect of the novel appears in its self-referential quality -- more particularly labeled metafiction, which means fiction about the nature of fiction itself. While this has a long history (Tom Jones by Henry Fielding is an 18th century example), the emphasis on form in Modern literature led to an exposure of the same (i.e. illustrating the artifice of fiction) in much of contemporary literature. Literary movements usually move in reactionary cycles: authors grow frustrated with established conventions and have to reinvent the art of literature to fit the new age. Thus, in Things They Carry, you'll find a writer who ironically discusses the act of writing itself: he both tells a great story -- and tells us he's telling a great story. And watch for references to the "author" himself -- and be aware that post-modern writers love to play around with the idea of the narrator/author.

Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day" is relevant here and will be discussed in class

XVIII (765 in Textbook)
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimm'd:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The Life
Tim O'Brien grew up in small-town Minnesota (where he experienced first-hand the clash of small-town morals with the outside world). He credits his mother, a first grade teacher, with investing in him the importance of paying attention to details when writing. Attending a state college in Minnesota, he majored in Political Science and was elected the student body president. Upon graduation, he was drafted in August of 1968, and served seven months as a radio operator in Chu Lai. Wounded twice, he spent the last five months of his Vietnam tour as a clerk, away from combat duty. After his tour of duty, he attended graduate school at Harvard, and completed (but did not defend) his dissertation, and began writing for the Washington Post in 1972 (Kaplan 1-9). His first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, a memoir of his service in Vietnam, established him as a writer of talent, and his novel Going After Cacciato (which is also set in Vietnam), after winning the National Book Award in 1979, vaulted him into the upper ranks of American authors.

He has a very generous spirit as a writer, regularly appearing at workshops (my office mate worked with him years ago and found him refreshingly unpretentious and "down to earth") and giving copious interviews on his craft. On his penchant for writing about Vietnam, he noted "[my] concerns as a human being and . . . as an artist have at some point intersected in Vietnam -- not just in the physical place, but in the spiritual and moral terrain of Vietnam" (qt. in Kaplan 4-5). And as this novel makes clear, this is a terrain well worth exploring.


"I'll Take You There"

Unless marked otherwise, the images below are from wikimedia

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/77/My_Lai_massacre.jpg
Click to enlarge

My Lai Massacre

* For a compelling overview of My Lai, see the page below (note -- it's on a rather repellent site, but the material on the page I've linked is quite good). http://www.rotten.com/library/history/war-crimes/my-lai-massacre/

Another good My Lai site
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Lai_massacre

Long and detailed article on the massacre
http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/mass/lai/index_1.html

For a contemporary version of My Lai, see the following http://www.rotten.com/library/crime/prison/abu-ghraib/

http://www.msad40.org/mvhs/library/images/vietnam_march.jpg
click to enlarge

Visual of a soldier's life: lots of "humping."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fd/US-Army-troops-patrol-Vietnamese-rice-paddy-outside-village.jpg/800px-US-Army-troops-patrol-Vietnamese-rice-paddy-outside-village.jpg

Walking along a dike separating rice patties
(click to enlarge)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d4/TrangBang.jpg

Effects of napalm. See article on this famous picture

baby water buffalo

Baby water buffalo
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_4LJig4kYi8s/TSmtXNyXFCI/
AAAAAAAABJU/6lNV6S5pMsc/s1600/DSC02961.JPG

Links

For additional photos, try this link from the New York Times. Additional pictures can be found here.

Connections between Vietnam and Iraq? See Ron Kovic's essay published on Truthdig. Note: it's a partisan view.

The New York Times is running a series of essays on the year 1967 of the Vietnam war.  It's a great source for personal reflections and more interpretative essays.  For backgrounds on the war -- back to pre WWII -- see "The 30 Years War in Vietnam."


Vietnam Glossary
In this novel you'll find several military acronyms, topical references, etc., that may need a bit of explaining. Hence, a glossary. 

Let's clarify three things, right off the bat.

Vietnam: Area/country in southeast Asia with an independent language, culture, and government. Partitioned into North and South Vietnam in 1954 in response to the western fear of communism, the two countries were rejoined in 1976 after the fall of the South Vietnamese government. During the war years, the country was bisected by the DMZ (Demilitarized Zone).

North Vietnam: The communist controlled area of Vietnam -- they wanted to unite the country under one rule. South Vietnam's and, because of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), our enemy.

South Vietnam: The non-communist, nominally democratic (but really autocratic) area of Vietnam. Our ally due to SEATO which stated that any member which comes under attack will enjoin all members in its defense. South Vietnam and America were members: North Vietnam was not.

worldmap.gif (21434 bytes)

 

 

 

Interactive Vietnam map
click to view

Period Maps (circa. 1968) click to view

http://www.vietvet.org/visit/maps/rookernorth.jpg

http://www.vietvet.org/visit/maps/rookernortheast.jpg

http://www.vietvet.org/visit/maps/rookersouth.jpg

http://www.vietvet.org/visit/maps/rookersoutheast.jpg

1968 (period map)
http://www.vietvet.org/visit/maps/1968map.htm

AK-47: Standard issue rifle used by North Vietnamese. Cheap, reliable, deadly. Now a designer weapon for drug dealers.
America: love it or leave it: phrase adopted by the great unthinking class as a response to protests against the war. It stifles dissent by suggesting that "you're either with merica', or you're with the terrorists." Oops, wrong war -- but same idea.
ARVN Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Considered poor fighters by US service men.
Bao Dai: The "playboy emperor." Last emperor of Vietnam, courted and assisted by both communist and American regimes because "the people" accepted him as a sovereign ruler. An opportunist, and for that reason, a survivor.
Bouncing Betty: a type of land mine. After a soldier, civilian, or water buffalo would step upon it, a little rocket/bomb would shoot up that exploded at about waist height. Usually deployed by the North Vietnamese.
Claymore: rectangular mine set off by remote control. It would send a shower of lead in a triangular killing field. Usually deployed by Americans. See picture below

http://freepages.military.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~bobw/claymore01.jpg

Diem, Ngo Dinh: Autocratic ruler of South Vietnam from 1955-63. Corrupt, a Roman Catholic in a Buddhist country, he was propped up by American officials because of his hard line stance against communism. Assassinated by his own military in a 1963 coup.
domino theory: argument used by American political leaders to support a war against communism. They believed that if one country fell to communism, then others around it would fall as well (like a line of dominoes). What they never seemed to address was why communism would prove so attractive. I mean, it's not a virus or anything, it's merely a political system. 
Gook: US military slang for a Vietnamese person.
Gulf of Tonkin: located in North Vietnam (see map above). Important because US military and intelligence reported that a Navy destroyer, the USS Maddox, was attacked by North Vietnamese gunboats in 1964, which lead to a resolution to increase military presence and its role in South Vietnam. It is now generally accepted that the attack did not take place and some feel that the military and intelligence agencies perpetuated a hoax to prompt deeper US involvement in the war. 
Hawks and doves: shorthand to describe support for (hawks) or opposition to (doves) the war. Prominent hawks from the era include John F. Kennedy (though he was there before the term really was bandied about), Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger. The main dove mentioned in the novel is Senator and Democratic Presidential Nominee Eugene McCarthy.
Ho Chi Minh: The political and spiritual (in an agnostic sense) leader of North Vietnam. In the 1950s, after reading the Declaration of Independence, he approached American officials in France (where he was educated) and asked them for his help in overthrowing the French colonial powers. We refused due to treaty alliances and because of cheap rubber (Vietnam's primary export) and Minh then turned to Russia and China for support. 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Ho_Chi_Minh_1946_cropped.jpg

R&R: Rest and relaxation. A vacation from the battlefield typically involving a trip (or trips) to a brothel, drinking, and, if such was your preference, drugs. Sleep and good food as well. In other words, creature comforts for 19 year old males.
klicks: slang for kilometers
Eugene McCarthy: presidential candidate in 1968 elections who was against the war. To support him meant you too were against the war.
M-16: Standard issue rifle used by the US and South Vietnamese. It was expensive, semi-reliable, and deadly. Because of its toy-like look, it has not become a designer weapon for drug dealers.

Three for one: 1) M-16 rifle; 2) Flack Jacket; 3) "hootch" or grass house, typical of Vietnamese civilian villages. Very flammable -- which helped make napalm (see below) such a useful (?) military tool.

hootch

from http://s88.photobucket.com/albums/k188

mortar: tube like cannon, easily hidden, transported, and operated. A favorite of the Viet Cong.
napalm: bombs filled with jelled gasoline which ignites on contact with the air. Usually dropped from jets which resulted in a streak of fire (momentum of bomb would spread flame).
tracer rounds: bullets treated with a chemical to make them flammable on contact. If fired at night would leave a streak of light -- handy for aiming, though it also made a great target.
Sterno: metal cans of jelled petroleum. Pop the top, instant stove.
Tran Hung Dao: Vietnamese general who repelled Mongol invasions in the 13C. (roughly equivalent to George Washington in America -- i.e. military founding father).
Tot Dong: field where the Vietnamese defeated the Chinese in 1426, leading to their independence (think Bunker Hill).
VC: short for Viet Cong, the communist guerrilla fighters who lived in South Vietnam. 
Walked point: walking at the head of line of soldiers in a patrol. Dangerous because you would be the first person to encounter a landmine, sniper, or ambush.
Willie Peter: Short for White Phosphorous, a incendiary explosive material.


Focus for each day

Day 1
Focus: Reading novels in general -- focusing in and looking at the whole; historical/cultural background; characters in the story; truth and reality

"To read a novel is a difficult and complex art [ . . . . ]  You must be capable not only of great fineness of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you are going to make use of all that the novelist -- the great artist -- gives you" (Woolf).


"One explanation for O'Brien's habit of varying and echoing and repeating phrases and thoughts and scenes and stories in his writings is that this stylistic device mirrors his notion of fiction as a means for conveying the fluidity of all experience.  According to O'Brien's approach to fiction, one can use the same phrase or tell the same story again and again, and yet each time one does so, the phrase or the story somehow takes on a new character.  Fiction and language for him do not mirror life: they transform life" (Kaplan 18).

Kaplan, Steven.  Understanding Tim O'Brien. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina, 1995.  Print.
Woolf, Virginia.  "How Should One Read a Book?" The Second Common Reader.  1935.  Gutenberg.org. Web. 3 August 2015.

Using Note Cards 

Focusing in and looking at the whole
By this I mean learning to move between individual stories and chapters, and then applying them to a larger reading of the novel as a whole. See the chapters "Stockings" then "Church" for this kind of connection.

You'll need to develop a "reading," "interpretation," or "approach" to the novel to understand. Note: there are many different readings, interpretations, or approaches.

How a summary misses the point:
How to tell a True War Story

Rat Killey, the medic writes to a friend's sister about the death of her brother.  The narrator keeps pointing out the ways to tell that this is a true story. His  friend was playing catch with Rat, and stepped to the side coming down on a mine.  He goes into great detail about the gore of the accident, then says that the story  is fake.

Characters: distinguish between them
Tim O'Brien: Jimmy Cross: Martha: Elroy Berdhal: Kiowa: Ted Lavender: Lee Strunk: Dave Jensen: Rat Kiley: Mary Anne: Mark Fossie: Norman Bowker: Kathleen, Azar, Bobby Jorgenson, Linda:

Historical/cultural background
  • What do you know about the Vietnam War.
  • The 60s were a time of change and turmoil.  As a society, America moved from an acceptance of authority (the Eisenhower years [ex-general] stasis) to a questioning of authority (JFK [young -- committed to change]); From Levitt towns to communes
  • What does change do to some people?
  • Look at epigram of novel -- From what war is it from?  Why the Civil War; why not, say, WWI or WWII?
  • Go to page 40ish of novel -- then 45.

Timeline
1954 CIA funded covert operations against North Vietnam in 1954
1957 Little Rock Schools integrated w/ federal troops
1961 Freedom rides in the south
1963 Kennedy Assassinated
1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
1967 Seventy cities experience black riots
1968 Tet Offensive
1968 Martin Luther King
1968 Robert Kennedy assasisanated
1975 Last helicopters leave South Vietnam

Truth and reality
  • The Two Hilters
  • Let's start with the writer: How many Tim O'Brien's are there?  Are they the same?
  • (Bring in several novels that do not have "A Work of Fiction"  written on them) What's odd about the title page compared to the other novels?
  • What about the dedication then?

General questions

"Things They Carried"

  1. Consider the following sentences "It was't cruelty, just stage presence. They were actors" (20). Why? Why characterize the soldiers as "actors"? And what effect does this have on their actions -- and our understanding of them?
  2. Why the accumulation of specific weight and specific detail in the lists of the things they carry? What effect does it have on the reader? And how do they contrast with the other paragraphs in the story?
  3. What is LTV. Cross crying about (17)? What is this story really "about"?
  4. Why is this the first story/chapter in the novel? How does it connect to the other stories?

"Spin"

  1. How does this story function as a foreshadowing for the rest of the novel? Pick out pages/details and explain.

"On the Rainy River"

  1. Why does the narrator work in a pig slaughter house? Does it foreshadow his experiences in Vietnam in some way? See, especially, page 42.
  2. Why is Tim so upset with the people that support the war?
  3. What is "courage" to the narrator? Given the story, do you agree or disagree with him?
  4. What is Elroy Berdhal's function in the story? Why not just have O'Brien standing on a windswept prominence, debating whether he should go to Canada or not? What does Berdhal represent?


 Day 2
Focus: Assign secondary source readings; use of symbolic/figurative language; loss; memory; revenge; truth and reality again -- why the book "lies" to readers

Psychology and fiction
"What is clear in all these cases --whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we probably all have based on misattribution or source confusion -- is that, in the absence of outside confirmation, there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls 'historical truth' and 'narrative truth'" (Sacks).
Sacks, Oliver.  "Speak, Memory." The New York Review of Books.  21 February 2013. Web. 17 February 2013.

On details leading people astray:
"The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary" 

"The uncritical substitution of plausibility for probability has pernicious effects on judgments when scenarios are used as tools of forecasting. Consider these two scenarios, which were presented to different groups, with a request to evaluate their probability:
  • A massive flood somewhere in North America next year, in which more than 1,000 people drown
  • An earthquake in California sometime next year, causing a flood in which more than 1,000 people drown

The California earthquake scenario is more plausible than the North America scenario, although its probability is certainly smaller. As expected, probability judgments were higher for the richer and more detailed scenario, contrary to logic. This is a trap for forecasters and their clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true. See "Good Form" (details=squirrel) and end of "How to Tell" (missing the point).

On the difference between memory and experience:
"A comment I heard from a member of the audience after a lecture illustrates the difficulty of distinguishing memories from experiences. He told of listening raptly to a long symphony on a disc that was scratched near the end, producing a shocking sound, and he reported that the bad ending "ruined the whole experience." But the experience was not actually ruined, only the memory of it. The experiencing self had had an experience that was almost entirely good, and the bad end could not undo it, because it had already happened. My questioner had assigned the entire episode a failing grade because it had ended very badly, but that grade effectively ignored 40 minutes of musical bliss. Does the actual experience count for nothing? Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion -- and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self."

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman


"Rainy River"
  • Finish background on war and shift to language 
  • Amour meat packing -- gun, etc.  He's been in "war" and doesn't like it.
  • Move to Elroy: and courage

"Speaking of Courage"
  • What do you make about the lake? How is it connected to the war?
  • What day of the year is it?
  • Why does he keep riding around the lake
  • Why include the scene at the drive in?  What's going on there?
  • How does the very end of the story replicate the war?
  • Why does he take a sip of the disgusting water?

"Good Form"
  • Why include this story/essay?
  • What's the difference between happening truth and story truth?
  • Go to Colin Powell videos

"How to Tell a True War Story"
  • Discuss the nueroscience of memory: how it's all constructed and how the only true memory is the first one.
  • Go to the different times Lemon dies
  • Love story: the letter Kiley writes: it's clear he feels love
    • but mention how he's stuck in a Vietnam mode and can't tell that what he writes to the sister is creepy.
  • Here or earlier, analogy of me on trial for murder: three people: me, friend who is my alibi, person in holding cell with me the night I was arrested -- and who has been promised reduced time if he testifies.
    • my buddy stumbling over what we were doing that night,
    • person I was in holding cell with says
 

Day 3
Focus: Getting a handle on your interpretation -- choosing a reading/approach to the novel; connecting the ideas in the novel to sources; questions for Essay #2

From Aristotle's Poetics
"The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular. By the universal I mean how a person of a certain type on occasion speak or act, according to the law of probability or necessity; and it is this universality at which poetry aims in the names she attaches to the personages." 
http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/poetics.1.1.html Written 350 B.C.E Translated by S. H. Butcher

Relativism
In philosophy, the position that all value judgements (e.g. ethics, morality, and truth) are relative to the standpoint of the beholder. To put it another way, relativism does not accept that there is an absolute ground or reference point that could provide an objective guarantee that things are not necessarily the same as they are perceived to be by a given subject. If one is neither religious nor a hard-headed realist, then some version of relativism is unavoidable, which creates a great many difficulties for philosophers in this situation because it is easy (though not necessarily accurate or just) to turn this into an accusation. Postmodernism has been taken to task on numerous occasions for precisely this reason: it challenges the plausibility and possibility of an absolute ground. As a consequence it has been charged with being apolitical, ahistorical, unethical, and so on, because all these things -- politics, history, ethics, etc. -- are said to require a ground to function properly. As Jean-Francois Lyotard shows, the problem with relativismis that it enables historical revisionists such as Holocaust-deniers to claim that their position is as valid as any other. His solution, only partially successful, is to focus on what he calls truth-regimes. Alain Badiou offers a slightly different solution to the same problem via a retooling of Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of the project. Badiou's project is that which attracts political conviction, i.e. a belief equal in strength to religious belief. See also anti-foundationalism.

Buchanan, Ian. "relativism." A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press, 2010. Oxford Reference. 2010. http://www.oxfordreference.com.libproxy.ocean.edu:2048/view/10.1093/acref/9780199532919.001.0001/acref-9780199532919-e-595. Accessed 21 Dec. 2017.

And for a longer, more textured discussion, see this definition.

 

Quick review of Secondary Sources

"In the Field"

  • How does the metaphor of the "shit field" resonate throughout the story.  See, for example, bottom of page 163.
  • Who does O'Brien (author) suggest contributed to Kiowa's death?  (164, 166, 170, 176, 179) Why does he have different people take the blame -- what does this ultimately show about the cause of Kiowa's death?  And who showed Kiowa the picture of Billie?

"How to Tell a True War Story"
  • Perception 
  • Different times Lemon dies
  •  Lemon's sister v. Rat's letter 
  • VC Baby Water buffalo:Why more upset

"Lives of the Dead"
  • First sentence: how can a story save your life?  How does it "save" Linda's life? Does it save anyone else's life?  Does lack of a story cause anyone to die?
  • End of the novel -- metafiction 
  • What's the function of Linda? Why add her to the story?  What add her at the end instead of at the beginning?

Quick question: what's the purpose of "Ghost Soldiers"?

Any general comments/questions?

Review Essay Questions and show possible divisions with thesis statements.

Questions to Mull Over As You Read

General questions

  1. Consider the relevance of the following quote to the entire story: "Absolute occurrence is irrelevant. A thing may happen and be a total lie, another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth" (83). How does this relate to 1) the story/novel itself; 2) the nature of story telling in general?
  2. Which "True" is he talking about in the title of the story/chapter ("How to Tell a True War Story) -- the "happening-truth" or the "story-truth" ("Good Form" 179)? How can you tell -- or not tell? Does O'Brien feel this distinction is important? Why or why not?
  3. Trace the transformation of Mary Anne "Sweetheart:" she changes from ____ to _____. What could she symbolize? Why/how?
  4. What "Courage" is referred to in "Speaking of Courage"?
  5. How does the metaphor of the "shit field" resonate throughout the story. Why not, for example, a regular muddy field?
  6. How is imagination something positive in the book? (consider, for example, "Lives of the Dead," "Good Form"). How is it negative ("Thing They Carried," "Ghost Soldiers" -- other stories?)? What's the point?
  7. Why does Bowker taste the water at the end of "Speaking of Courage" (173)?
  8. What can the narrator O'Brien do that Bowker cannot? How can this ability save the narrator? (Consider "Notes")
  9. How does the narrator change? From what to what? (Take this in stages -- use particular chapters to trace this change) What stories show this? Where in those stories? Does your opinion of the narrator change?
  10. What's Linda doing in the novel? How does she or her story connect with other themes? If she and that chapter was not in the novel, how would it change? Another way of looking at this is why does "Lives of the Dead" conclude the novel?
  11. In an interview, O'Brien stated "If there is a theme to the whole book it has to do with the fact that stories can save our lives" (qtd. in Coffey 202). So, where's the theme? Point to at least three quotes that prove this.

Group Questions

Group questions #1

  1. What is Elroy Berdhal's function in the story? Why not just have O'Brien standing on a windswept prominence, debating whether he should go to Canada or not? What does Berdhal represent?
  2. Think about the following story connections: "Things They Carried" -- "Love" / "Speaking of Courage" -- "Notes." What is O'Brien attempting to construct/show with these stories pairs? It may help to connect these story pairs to "Good Form." Why does O'Brien include this ("Good Form" chapter? Why doesn't he place this chapter earlier?
  3. In an interview, O'Brien writes that "If there is a theme to the whole book it has to do with the fact that stories can save our lives" (qtd. in Publishers 202). How does the novel show this? Trace out this theme in the novel by showing that, indeed, the novel does argue that "stories can save our lives."
  4. Though ostensibly a war novel, the stories touch on many other issues as well. What, for instance, does the novel suggest about ____, _____, love, courage, how people cope?

Group questions #2

  1. This novel is filled with references to storytelling and writing (this is called metafiction - fiction about fiction). Connected to this is the idea that, as O'Brien mentioned in an interview, "stories can save our lives." How does this work in the novel? Could you divide it into different facets? What incidents could you use to prove your point?
  2. Much of the novel deals with questions of truth: first, decide on O'Brien's definition of truth ("For O'Brien truth is _______." "O'Brien looks at truth as _____") and then explain how the novel illustrates this definition. What incidents show this? How can you divide/classify it?
  3. What is O'Brien saying about history? ("For O'Brien, history is _____" "O'Brien believes that history _____"). What ideas/incidents in the novel show this? As above, can you break down his view of history as ____ into different categories?
  4. How do the questions O'Brien raises in the novel -- the slipperiness of truth, the ease with which people can be fooled, the apathy and willful ignorance of much American society, etc. -- manifest themselves in 21st century America? Another way of answering this questions is to ask yourself "How is this novel still relevant?"
  5. How is this a novel about love? What kinds of love? About coping? About guilt? About fear? About _____?

Works Cited

Kaplan, Steven. Understanding Tim O'Brien. Columbia, South Carolina: U of South Carolina, 1995.

Rudd, Mark. "We, the Young People." Ordinary Americans: U.S. History Through the Eyes of

Everyday People. Ed. Linda R. Monk. Alexandria, VA: Close Up Publishing, 1994.

248-49.

Sintoni, Joseph. "Our Country, Right or Wrong." Ordinary Americans: U.S. History Through the

Eyes of Everyday People. Ed. Linda R. Monk. Alexandria, VA: Close Up Publishing,

1994. 252.


Secondary Sources

Read "Why Fiction Trumps Truth" By Yuval Noah Harari.  Then choose one essay from numbers 1-19 and one essay from the Biographical selections, 1-3. Print, read, annotate and be prepared to answer the following question: "How did reading these secondary sources help your understanding of the novel?"

General

  1. The Undying Certainty of the Narrator in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Steven Kaplan. Critique 35.1 (Fall 1993): p43-52. NOTE: if the link is not working on your computer, try lowering the privacy/security settings on your browser. If that does not work, click on the "Library Links" from the course menu on the left, go to "Literature Resource Center" and get this article (hint: search by subject "The Things They Carried" or author "Kaplan, Steven.")
  2. Salvation, Storytelling, and Pilgrimage in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Alex Vernon. Mosaic 36.4 (Dec. 2003): p171-188. NOTE: if the link is not working on your computer, try lowering the privacy/security settings on your browser. If that does not work, click on the "Library Links" from the course menu on the left, go to "Literature Resource Center" and get this article (hint: search by subject "The Things They Carried" or author "Vernon, Alex.")

Coping 
  1. Recovery from Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms: A Qualitative Study of Attributions in Survivors of War
  2. Developing a model of narrative analysis to investigate the role of social support in coping with traumatic war memories. 
  3. Hope, Coping, and Social Support in Combat-Related Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
  4. "Healing processes in trauma narratives: A review." By: Kaminer, Debra. South African Journal of Psychology. Sep2006, Vol. 36 Issue 3, p481-499. 19p.
  5. From the New York Times: "The Hollow Man"

Truth (note: if you decide to write about this for your essay, read 7, 9, 13 before writing thesis.
  1. "Relativism." Noel Castree, Rob Kitchin, and Alisdair Rogers.  A Dictionary of Human Geography : Oxford University Press, 2013. Oxford Reference. 2013.
  2. Plato's Allegory of the Cave
  3. Relativism, Truth, Reality.
  4. "Saying Good-bye to Historical Truth"  A 1991 essay by psychologist Donald Spence. 
  5. Reversing the Truth Effect: Learning the Interpretation of Processing Fluency in Judgments of Truth. Full Text Available Academic Journal By: Unkelbach, Christian. Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory & Cognition. Jan2007, Vol. 33 Issue 1, p219-230. 12p. 7 Charts. DOI: 10.037/0278-7393.33. .219. 
  6. Making Things Present: Tim O'Brien's Autobiographical Metafiction. Silbergleid, Robin. Contemporary Literature, Spring2009, Vol. 50 Issue 1, p129-155, 27p. (Article) CLICK ON PDF TO READ THE ARTICLE. NOTE: if the link is not working on your computer, try lowering the privacy/security settings on your browser. If that does not work, click on the "Library Links" from the course menu on the left, go to "Literature Reference Center" and get this article (hint: search by subject "The Things They Carried" or author "Silbergleid, Robin.") PDF Full Text (1.5MB)\
  7. `How to tell a true war story': Metafiction in The Things They Carried. Calloway, Catherine. Critique, Summer95, Vol. 36 Issue 4, p249, 9p. (Literary Criticism) NOTE: if the link is not working on your computer, try lowering the privacy/security settings on your browser. If that does not work, click on the "Library Links" from the course menu on the left, go to "Literature Reference Center" and get this article (hint: search by subject "The Things They Carried" or author "Calloway, Catherine.") HTML Full Text PDF Full Text (283KB)
  8. David Broyles "Why Men Love War
  9. "The Most Curious Thing" by Errol Morris -- on torture at Abu Ghraib.
  10. From Ramparts magazine: "The Whole Thing Was a Lie"
  11. How to Revise a True War Story John Young
  12. Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds." The New Yorker, 27 Feb. 2017. www.newyorker.com, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/27/why-facts-dont-change-our-minds. Accessed on 2, Nov. 2018.

Biographical
  1. Conversation with Tim O'Brien. Tim O'Brien and Tobey C. Herzog. Writing Vietnam, Writing Life: Caputo, Heinemann, O'Brien, Butler. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2008. p88-133. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jelena O. Krstovic. Vol. 123. Detroit: Gale. Word Count: 21839. From Literature Resource Center. NOTE: if the link is not working on your computer, try lowering the privacy/security settings on your browser. If that does not work, click on the "Library Links" from the course menu on the left, go to "Literature Resource Center" and get this article (hint: search by subject "The Things They Carried" or author "Herzog, Tobey." You'll have to click on the "Biography" tab at the top of the page.)
  2. A Conversation with Tim O'Brien. Tim O'Brien and Patrick Hicks. Indiana Review 27.2 (Winter 2005): p85-95. NOTE: if the link is not working on your computer, try lowering the privacy/security settings on your browser. If that does not work, click on the "Library Links" from the course menu on the left, go to "Literature Resource Center" and get this article (hint: search by subject "The Things They Carried" or author "Hicks, Patrick." You'll have to click on the "Biography" tab at the top of the page.)
  3. An interview. Tim O'Brien and Martin Naparsteck. Contemporary Literature 32.1 (Spring 1991): p1-11. NOTE: if the link is not working on your computer, try lowering the privacy/security settings on your browser. If that does not work, click on the "Library Links" from the course menu on the left, go to "Literature Resource Center" and get this article (hint: search by subject "The Things They Carried" or author "Naparsteck, Martin." You'll have to click on the "Biography" tab at the top of the page.)

On a different note . . .

General Essays on Vietnam

  1. The Long History of the Vietnam Novel New York Times

Radio Essays

"Reel" Life Fiction as Truth

PDF of novel

© 2001 David Bordelon