The American Experience
This short story addresses the American experience through Tim OBrien’s eyes. We are taken through a journey of a man who was conflicted between fighting for his country or fighting for his conscience.“I was twenty-one years old. Young, yes, and politically naive, but even so, the American war in Vietnam seemed to me wrong. Certain blood was being shed for uncertain reasons.” (pg.35) O’Brien felt like there was no need for this war and that it had no purpose. There was so much uncertainty that the narrator felt like it wasn’t wise for America to be going to war, and the only certainty was the moral confusion. The narrator believed in making the right decisions, especially when it comes to life preservation.”Knowledge, of course, is always imperfect, but it seemed to me that when a nation goes to war, it must have reasonable confidence in the justice and imperative of its cause. You can’t fix your mistakes. Once people are dead, you can’t make them undead.” (pg.36). Tim hates this war and didn’t want to be part of it, yet he was drafted, and he had a decision to make. Support his country or cower away and let his family down. He felt too good for war.
Tim uses Irony in this short story as he tries to explain why he is not built for war. “The sight of blood made me queasy, and I couldn’t tolerate authority, and I didn’t know a rifle from a slingshot.”(pg.34). But that summer, he worked at a plant along the disassembly line where he used to remove blood clots from the necks of dead pigs. He would use a water gun, which was massive and needed the whole body to maneuver it. He stood there for eight hours a day under a lukewarm blood-shower. This shows the exact aftermath scenery on a battlefield. And the way he described how he handled the water gun is quite similar to how to handle a rifle.
The use of symbolism in the story
Obrien has used symbolism in the short story.“ Emergency Fund” marked envelope that Elroy left out on the table for Tim. Elroy is the older man who owned the TipTop lodge that Tim stayed at for six days as he fled to Canada. Elroy knew what Tim was up to even without asking any questions. Tim had refused to take the money because he would be filled with even more guilt, knowing what he was going to do next. According to Tim, the older man saved his life.
Tim wanted the readers to visualize and almost feel what he was feeling. “That close—twenty yards—and I could see the delicate latticework of the leaves, the texture of the soil, the browned needles beneath the pines, the configurations of geology and human history. Twenty yards. I could’ve done it. I could’ve jumped and started swimming for my life. Inside me, in my chest, I felt a terrible squeezing pressure.”(pg. 44) He did not know what to do. He was confused and asked the readers what they would do.
As he hallucinated, OBrien visualizes many things he used to love. “Hot dogs and popcorn, stadium smells, stadium heat. A squad of cheerleaders did cartwheels along the banks of the Rainy River: they had megaphones and pompoms and smooth brown thighs” (pg. 45). He visualizes his future and why he wouldn’t like to leave for war. “My wife was there. My unborn daughter waved at me, and my two sons hopped up and down” (pg.45). Some people wanted him at war“ Joint Chiefs of Staff were there, and a couple of popes, and a first lieutenant named Jimmy Cross, and the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War, and Jane Fonda dressed up as Barbarella, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and my grandfather, and Gary Cooper, and a kind-faced woman carrying an umbrella and a copy of Plato’s Republic, and a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all shapes and colors—people in hard hats, people in headbands—they were all whooping and chanting and urging me toward one shore or the other. I saw faces from my distant past and distant future.”(pg. 46). He saw people he was to kill when he goes to war. “There was a slim young man I would one day kill with a hand grenade along a red clay trail outside the village of My Khe.” (pg. 46) Tim wanted the reader to feel the pressure he had and all these images flashing through his mind as he sat on that boat wondering which side he should choose. He couldn’t handle the embarrassment he would bring to himself, his family, his future family, and his ancestors.
Tim OBrien was an elite student who had a great future marked out for him. “A million things all at once—I was too good for this war. Too smart, too compassionate, too everything. It couldn’t happen. I was above it. I had the world dicked—Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude and president of the student body and a full-ride scholarship for grad studies at Harvard. A mistake, maybe—a foul-up in the paperwork.”(pg.33) He was sure this was an error, something he hadn’t planned for or thought ofbecause he was a liberal. He believed that it was a pointless war, and even in his hallucination, he saw an America that had been fighting wars and their people patriotic. “All my aunts and uncles were there, and Abraham Lincoln, and Saint George, and a nine-year-old girl named Linda who had died of a brain tumor back in fifth grade, and several members of the United States Senate, and a blind poet scribbling notes, and LBJ, and Huck Finn, and Abbie Hoffman, and all the dead soldiers back from the grave, and the many thousands who were later todie—villagers with terrible burns, little kids without arms or legs—yes, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff were there, and a couple of popes, and a first lieutenant named Jimmy Cross, and the last surviving veteran of the American Civil War, and Jane Fonda dressed up as Barbarella, and an old man sprawled beside a pigpen, and my grandfather, and Gary Cooper, and a kind-faced woman carrying an umbrella and a copy of Plato’s Republic, and a million ferocious citizens waving flags of all shapes and colors—people in hard hats, people in headbands—they were all whooping and chanting and urging me toward one shore or the other.”(pg. 46) All these people and the consequences it had was what the American experience was all about. It wasn’t about your morals or how good you were in school or what you were. If you didn’t go to war, whether or not you believed in its course, it would be a disgrace to you and your country, and that is how Tim ended up at war. A coward but on the battlefield driven by embarrassment.
REFERENCES
OBrien, Tim. The Things They Carried. Fourth Estate, an Imprint of HarperCollins, 2015.
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