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Norman Bowker's 'Peace At War'

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Peace at War The Indian spiritual leader, Sri Chinmoy, once stated, “War forgets peace. Peace forgives war. War is the death of the life human. Peace is the birth of the Life Divine. Our vital passions want war. Our psychic emotions desire peace.” When we decide to forget war and hatred in our society then the world will be at peace. Less people like Norman Bowker will be depressed because of something as tragic as war. Norman took his life because of war, that has to mean it isn’t very peaceful there right? Norman Bowker was a man that was so broken from war that he was unable to talk about it with anyone. Although some soldiers do not suffer from any PTSD at all, a lot of soldiers struggle with post traumatic stress disorder, which takes …show more content…

When Kiowa died, Norman blamed himself because he just let him sink away. Tim explains Norman’s feelings when Kiowa died, “Kiowa, after all, had been close friend, and for years I’ve avoided thinking about his death and my own complicity in it. Even here it’s not easy. In the interests of truth, however, I want to make it clear that Norman Bowker was in no way responsible for what happened to Kiowa.” (O’Brien 154). This quotes shows how broken Norman was when his best friend died. Norman always blamed himself because he felt like that is all he could do to show Kiowa his peace. In no way could Norman blame anyone else for what happened so he blamed himself which affected Tim because Tim believes it wasn’t his fault at all. Norman writes a letter to Tim telling him to write a story about how he let Kiowa get away and die. Norman wrote a letter to Tim expelling how war has changed him, “what you should do, Tim, is write a story about a guy who feels like he got zapped over in that sh*thole. A guy who cant get his life together and just drives around town all day and cant think of any damn place to go and doesn’t know how to get there anyway. This guy wants to ask about it, but he can’t…something about the field that night. The way Kiowa just disappeared into the crud. You were there—you can tell it” (O’Brien 151). This was Norman’s cry for help. He wanted his peace and he was hoping that if he saw it written out then he would be better. He thought that could talk about it then, but by the time it was written it was too late because Norman Bowker was already dead. Norman Bowker’s interactions with other characters drove his throughs to be as harsh as they were and caused him to blame himself for his best friend’s

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Norman had felt as if he had no one to talk to or relate to because no one around him had experienced war like he had. He tried to keep jobs when he was home from war, but not one of them had lasted more than 3 weeks. Since he feels he is unable to speak to anyone about war, he writes a letter to O’Brien, telling his entire war story. He soon feels as if he cannot do anything without thinking about war and hangs himself in the locker room of his town’s YMCA.

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When Norman Bowker thinks about his last memory of Kiowa, he has a heavy strain on his shoulders which caused him to kill himself. This also applies to when Chester Bennington, lead singer of Linkin Park, committed suicide. As Norman Bowker drived around in circles and reminiscing about life. He thought about Kiowa which gave him a guilt feeling of killing him. He believed that “a good war story,... was not a war for war stories, nor for talk of valor,...”(143) This showed how Kiowa’s death gave Norman an excessive feeling when knowing that he was not able to save Kiowa.

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The imaginary people would listen to him, even asking him “what you really need, friend” (O’Brien 146). The imaginary people would comfort him when no one else would, and had him admit that Kiowa’s death was his fault after they tried convincing him that “he was already gone” (O’Brien 147). This torture that Norman goes through eventually leads to Norman ending his

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In the chapter Speaking of Courage, the narrator explains how Norman tries to save Kiowa, “He would've talked about this, and how he grabbed Kiowa by the boot and tried to pull him out. He pulled hard but Kiowa was gone, and then suddenly he felt himself going, too.” (page 143). Norman lived with this for the rest of his life, playing what he could've done to save him over and over again in his head. Another example is in the chapter,

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When talking about war, there are many books with few answers to what war truly is. Barbara Ehrenreich brings forth not only the possibilities towards understanding war but also the passion people from history have had towards it. One key issue she brings to light is humanities love for war, so much so that people would use excuses like holy wars to justify their need to fight in a war. She declares that war is as muddled as the issue of diseases and where diseases came from around 200 years ago. More so than that she even goes further on to state that these rituals that date back to prehistoric times are the cause of human nature during times of war rather than human instinct.

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One event that seems to haunt him constantly is the death of his friend Kiowa. Years after the war, Norman continues to struggle with the images and atrocities of war. He even reaches out to O'Brien in a letter exclaiming, “the thing is,’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town. In general.

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Already he had passed them six times, forty-two miles, nearly three hours without stopping” (O’Brien 139-140). As if Norman was stuck in a loop, he drove around that lake, reliving moments of his life from when he was in Vietnam. He questioned, doubted, and second guessed things that had happened. He wants to tell his story to his friends but they all moved on with their lives while he was in Vietnam in the war, leaving him with no one. He wanted to talk to someone but he couldn’t.

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He was barbarized by the war and hence he was unable to integrate himself back into society. He no longer had any humanity to try to be a member of society because the war deprived him of any civil interactions. Norman Bowker did not have a life outside of the war. Before he took his life, Bowker wrote to O’Brien stating how he felt back in the United States, “‘The thing is,’ he wrote, ‘there’s no place to go. Not just in this lousy little town.

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However, Bloch gives us one more chapter involving the internal thoughts of Norman. The differences in this chapter is that it seems Mother has taken over for good, and we only receive her point of view. Bloch included this chapter to resolve an issue that was still left, outside of the murders Norman commits, the conflict between Mother and Norman. Bloch gives Norman this final section to allow him to recognize the reality of his mother’s absence and

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Readers find out later on in the vignette that Bowker feels as if he is responsible for Kiowa's death. He is unable to get over this death, and that is why he keeps circling the lake so many times; his pain is a never ending circle—no one is ever going to understand what he saw and why he did not win the Silver Star

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