Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy? By Tim O Brien

In the story, “Where Have You Gone, Charming Billy?”, Tim O’Brien uses characters to show that Imagination is a strong coping strategy when facing war. The protagonist in the story, Paul Berlin, is introduced as a new recruit who doesn’t want to be fighting in the Vietnam war. O’Brien makes this very clear and throughout the story, Paul is seen coping with the stress of the war by using his imagination. The first time O’Brien shows this is as Paul is marching through Vietnam with his troop in the night. This is how he describes what Paul is thinking, “He was pretending he was not in the war, pretending he had not watched Billy Boy Watkins die of a heart attack that afternoon. He was pretending he was a boy again, camping with his father in

He pretended he was not a soldier” (O’Brien 586). O’Brien uses flashbacks to show how much Paul misses his life before the war. He is using flashbacks as a way to cope with the stressful situation of marching through enemy territory. Because Paul is so stressed from the war, he is using his imagination to help change his current reality. The last sentence where he says he was pretending to not be a soldier is an obvious way that O’Brien shows how Paul is using his imagination to cope with being a soldier in the war. Shortly after, Paul is back marching again on an enemy road. In this situation, Paul is again using his imagination. This is how O’Brien tells of Paul’s way of distracting himself, “He counted his steps, concentrating on the numbers, pretending that the steps were dollar bills and that each step through the night made him richer and richer so that soon he would become a wealthy man, and he kept counting and considered the ways he might spend the money after the war and what he would do” (O’Brien

Since this is now the second time Paul is using his imagination to distract himself from his current situation, there has to be some deeper meaning. The deeper meaning is that, again, Paul is using his imagination to develop a different reality than the current one he’s dealing with. He is using counting to lower the amount of stress and fear that he is feeling while marching through the jungle. This theme is again shown at the end of the story when Paul is done marching. Paul is once again thinking about something else to distract him from the war. This is how O’Brien puts it, “Private First Class Paul Berlin lay back and turned his head so that he could lick at the dew with his eyes closed, another trick to forget the war. He might have slept. "I wasn't afraid," he was screaming or dreaming, facing his father's stern eyes. "I wasn't afraid," he was saying” (O’Brien 590). Now at the end of the story, O’Brien uses foreshadowing again to show Paul is thinking about another reality where he’s no longer dealing with war. This is another instance where his imagination helps relieve his