In the Time of the Butterflies, a novel by Julia Alvarez, tells the story of four sisters living in the Dominican Republic during Trujillo’s reign in the nation. The novel details the sisters’ fight for freedom against the dictatorship, as well as giving readers a personal glimpse of these women’s lives. It shares all four sisters’ fictionalized perspectives and shows their opposition to the regime from beginning to end. When people think of heroes, they think of individuals that show courage, that stay strong in the face of danger and what they stand for, whether they be superheroes or people like firefighters. Most people remove themselves from the idea of accomplishing heroic feats because of the separation between the “ordinary” and the heroic.
This chapter “The Ghost Soldiers”, showed us how Tim O’Brien and the other soldiers were dealing with the war both physically and psychologically. It also shows us how the Tim O'Brien behaved and felt when he was shot, wounded and had a bacteria infection on his butt and how the war changed the way he thought, and viewed the other soldiers around him. This chapter also contain a lot of psychological lens. From the way Tim O’Brien felt when he was shot and separated from his unit to a new unit to when he wanted revenge on Bobby Jorgenson for almost “killing” him.
The main point is how he has to deal with death from a young age to the combat zones. In a way he blames himself for the deaths of his friends or failing to save them, but he failed to understand that it is not his fault. He just needs to find a way to understand since he is forty three years old and has to find closure, O’Brien at the conclusion of his book said “I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is as Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.” (233) He realized through his writing that he was carrying things with him that needed to be explained to him or it was going to hurt him mentally and physically.
In the short story, “The Man I Killed,” O’Brien focuses on this to show that everyone fighting in a war has a story. He spends the story describing the man he killed and searching for justification of his actions. He carries around guilt with him because of it, and his fellow soldiers try to help him justify and come to terms with his action by saying things like, “You want to trade places with him? Turn it all upside down= you want that? I mean, be honest,” (126) and “Tim, it’s a war.
Tim O’Brien is the author of the fictional novel The Things They Carried. In this Novel O’Brien writes about different stories that relate back to the Vietnam War. The novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress is book written by Dai Sijie about the communist rule over China. In these novels we see each of the novels are fiction novels even though they both are related to true stories. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction, Patricia Waugh defines metafiction as: “…fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. . .”
He spends the summer working in a horrible, nasty meatpacking plant in Minnesota. He is undecided and confused on whether or not he should go fight a war he doesn’t agree with. One day, O’Brien suddenly left work and drove north toward Canada. He ended up at a northern Minnesota river which separates Minnesota and Canada. He stayed at a small fishing resort called the Tip Top Lodge where
Society, in his mind, does not understand how he is forced to fight for a cause he does not want to help. They are responsible for this conflict when the government sends him his draft card. Society creates a separate conflict, and he, of all people, is forced to help fix it. If he does not help, society will look down on him, and possibly they will come after him in Tim’s mind with “helicopters and searchlights and barking dogs” (O’Brien 53). For this reason, he chooses to go off to war; perhaps he will not be killed and have a new life when he comes back.
Ambiguity Lingers On Edith Wharton, who is an American author, states “The novelist must rely on what maybe called the illuminating incident to reveal and emphasize the inner meaning of each situation” (Wharton). Tim O’Brien uses illuminating moments to show how war makes guilt ambiguous. By examining three specific moments, the reader discovers how difficult it is to deal with the ambiguities of guilt. Lieutenant Jimmy Cross suffers from the ambiguity of guilt about Ted Lavender’s death.
O’Brien tells the readers about him reflecting back twenty years ago, he wonders if running away from the war were just events that happened in another dimension, he pictures himself writing a letter to his parents: “I’m finishing up a letter to my Parents that tells what I'm about to do and why I'm doing it and how sorry I am that I’d never found the courage to talk to them about it”(O’Brien 80). Even twenty years after his running from the war, O’Brien still feels sorry for not finding the courage to tell his parents about his decision of escaping to Canada to start a new life. O’Brien presented his outlook that even if someone was not directly involved in the war, this event had impacted them indirectly, for instance, how a person’s reaction to the war can create regret for important friends and
Tim O’Brien never lies. While we realise at the end of the book that Kiowa, Mitchell Sanders and Rat Kiley are all fictional characters, O’Brien is actually trying to tell us that there is a lot more truth hidden in these imagined characters than we think. This suggests that the experiences he went through were so traumatic, the only way to describe it was through the projection of fictional characters. O’Brien explores the relationship between war experiences and storytelling by blurring the lines between truth and fiction. While storytelling can change and shape a reader’s opinions and perspective, it might also be the closest in helping O’Brien cope with the complexity of war experiences, where the concepts like moral and immorality are being distorted.
It was not Tim’s sense of nationalist loyalties that caved him; rather, it was helplessness and his reputation that was at risk. Tim O’Brien longed to be that “secret hero” or “Lone Ranger” in order to impress those around him. However, he ends up learning that courage does not come in finite quantities. He finds himself resenting authority, “If you support a war, if you think it’s worth the price, that’s fine, but you have to put your own precious fluids on the line”. No matter how much he may find the law cruel and inhuman, he has is too prideful and decides to comply with the rules.
There was no sense of morality or politics or duty. Tim completed what he was trained to do, and that was to defend the camp against the enemy. The lone soldier was the enemy. Later Tim views his actions as impulsive and regrets throwing the grenade, despite his peers’ support. Tim declares, “Sometimes I forgive myself, sometimes I don’t.
He fought a war in Vietnam that he knew nothing about, all he knew was that, “Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons” (38). He realized that he put his life on the line for a war that is surrounded in controversy and questions. Through reading The Things They Carried, it was easy to feel connected to the characters; to feel their sorrow, confusion, and pain. O’Briens ability to make his readers feel as though they are actually there in the war zones with him is a unique ability that not every author possess.
How it was shaped: Tim allowed the draft of the Vietnam war and societal pressures get to the best of him and he slowly tore himself apart, he started off as a confident incorrigible man. His morals later then became corrupted, he gave into the pressures, his self proclaimed Lone Ranger status had been infected and debunked by his end decision of serving in the Vietnam war. Thesis: In the story, On the Rainy River, the author, Tim O’Brien demonstrates that an individual allows societal pressures and expectations to override their core values, morals, and beliefs; peer pressure forces individuals to put their beliefs aside so they can fit in with everyone else. The narrator, Tim O’Brien faces a similar situation when he get’s drafted for the Vietnam War.
1 In “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” the protagonist is Fossie’s GIrlfriend, Mary Anne, who comes to the medical base in Vietnam to stay with Fossie. She comes very new and shiny and girly but then becomes dark and manly and obsessed with the war. Figurative Language - In the beginning when Mary Anne first arrives, Rat describes her as, “ She had long white legs and blue eyes and complexion like strawberry ice cream.”
