Thursday, February 28, 2008
Week 7: Open Topic
One of the recurring structures of the book is storytelling. I think this is an interesting topic to cover because O’Brien believes that stories contain immense power and allow tellers and listeners to confront the past together and share knowledge with each other. From Mitchell Sanders stories of the six men who hear sounds in the jungle to Rat Kiley shooting himself in the foot so that he can be excused from Vietnam, we see the author Tim O’Brien use storytelling as an attempt to lure us into the “Jungle” of Vietnam with him and Alpha Company. This is what this book consists of, short stories, and they are accounts from Tim O’Brien that he is manifesting through memory and filling us in on so when we discussed the criteria for a true war story the other day in class this theme of storytelling came to mind. In the book Mitchell Sanders admits to making up a few things in the story about the six men in the jungle just so he could get his point across, and we see why he did this, because true war stories aren’t believable. Nobody wants to hear about women being raped and children being murdered, villages being burnt, and POWS being tortured. Listeners want to hear crazy stories about a wall soldiers in the Jungle and this “storytelling” can be related to the “Red Convertible” or “Circus in the Attic” how the whole story practically was built around this bed of lies and heroic sounding stories.
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I agree Zach, an important theme and running concept in the novel. I would say that at the end of "Spin" on page 38, O'Brien sums up his entire opinion of story and continues this less abrasive way of telling the realities of war through the rest of the book. He discusses how remembering will lead to a story and once a memory is committed to story, it is forever. No one will listen to the facts of war, they just want the stories. This again runs parallel with the idea that everything is a story. The whole, "Who are you, where are you from?" This is nothing but asking a person to tell their story. But the question is, if life consists of story telling and those consist of seemingly real memories that are mixed with shadows of lies and truth, then isn't the phrase "open communication" a little silly and impractical? How do we ever learn the truth about another person, or is there even any way to do that? If they told you the truth, would it be? How would you know?
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