THEMES ANALYSIS

The Power of Language

The emotional immaturity of the GI’s in Vietnam makes it imperative that they find ways to cope with the killing of enemies and the dying of friends. O’Brien writes, “They used a hard vocabulary to contain the terrible softness.” (Page 20) The soldiers within a platoon formed intimate relationships, but when death occurred language helped trivialize those bonds to make the separation less painful. They used words like greased, zapped, offed, lit up, to describe the deaths of their friends. When Ted Lavender died, the soldiers in his platoon talked as if it were the tranquilizers that had killed him - blew his mind. They way they described it in the stories he didn’t feel a thing. O’Brien remembers how, earlier in his life when Linda had died, Nick Vorheen had described it as ‘kicking the bucket’. Language is a coping mechanism, a way of making things less painful, or less real.

The Nature of Courage

When he is forced into a decision over whether to report for the draft of run to Canada, OÂ’Brien discovers that his understanding of courage is not quite correct. He had believed that courage was of a finite quantity, something that accrued at a fixed rate. If you emptied your account on one occasion, you would immediately have to begin saving for the next. Thus, he is surprised that the courage he had saved over the years is insufficient to carry him through his test of will on the Rainy River. Later, he reflects back on Nick Vorheen trying to steal away LindaÂ’s red stocking cap, saying that he should have intervened, if only to practice being brave for future reference. Courage, he concludes, is a skill that must be learned like everything else.

Courage is also interlocked with fear and shame. O’Brien believes many of the things we do are not motivated by courage, but by shame. “Men killed, and died,” he writes, “because they were embarrassed not to.” (Page 21) Men did not march up and down the mountains of Vietnam because they were brave, but because they were afraid to be cowards, afraid to be humiliated in the eyes of their peers. This notion is illustrated in the story about Curt Lemon, where he has the dentist pull out a perfectly good tooth just to prove he’s not afraid of the drill. But when Rat Kiley finally shoots himself out of desperation, no one in the platoon labels him a coward. Perhaps O’Brien feels that his action required more courage than to mutely continue marching through the brush.

OÂ’Brien revels in the ironical notion that the decisions which require the greatest courage are those that will cause others to label you a coward. This is the test that he himself cannot pass, the reason heÂ’s so disappointed with himself. He allows fear of ridicule from his parents, his friends, and the townspeople dictate his decision instead of following his conscious.

Happening Truth vs. Story Truth

O’Brien wants his stories to more than inform or educate. His writing style requires an emotional investment from the reader in order to understand the meaning. As such, when he tells a story he doesn’t feel bound by objectivity, or chronology, or even ‘truth’. The reader is often left wondering what really happened and what is invented. If you feel cheated because the story is fabricated, you’re missing the point - there are true war stories that never happened. They are parables, in a sense, conveying a message in a way so that the reader can feel it. For example, the blurb about a soldier who falls on the grenade trying to save his buddies, but they all die anyway. (Page 83) The story asserts the unspoken rule that acts of heroism do not always save lives. Sometimes they are not even remembered at all. This is contrary to what we would like to believe about war, and therein lies the truth. “A true war story, if truly told, makes the stomach believe.” (Page 78)

But he also points out many people cannot listen or read with their stomachs, they want stories with heroic plots and happy endings. After one reading, a lady approaches him and suggests he put away the sad memories and find new stories to tell. This lady didnÂ’t understand the underlying message of the story. They arenÂ’t really war stories at all, theyÂ’re stories that use war as a vehicle for insights about life. None of the stories are true because they never really happened; yet there is truth in the stories that somehow makes them more real than an actual occurrence.

Redemption

OÂ’BrienÂ’s character is only one of a few characters searching for a way of unloading the emotional gear picked up during the war. His sense of guilt is two-fold. He never completely forgives himself for failing to take a moral stand against the war instead of enlisting. Compounding this original sin are the deaths of the soldiers around him, be they friend or foe, while he somehow survives the war. He obsesses over a young Viet Cong soldier he killed with a hand grenade, imagining the boy to be just like himself. KiowaÂ’s death is written in such a way as to lead us to believe that he was the young soldier who turned on the flashlight at night, causing the platoon to be mortared. Whether or not this is the case, KiowaÂ’s death has such a profound affect on him that he returns to the spot twenty years later in an attempt to find closure. OÂ’BrienÂ’s re-immersion back the muck of the shit field is a type of baptism. Though he emerges stained with sewage, he is somehow cleansed within. To further emphasize the chapter as a transitional point in the authorÂ’s life, he buries KiowaÂ’s sandals deep in the mud.

For other characters, the search for redemption is not as successful. Lt. Cross spends most of the war carrying around guilt for the lives lost because he was thinking about Martha instead of watching for ambushes. Each time a member of the platoon dies he takes personal responsibility. When he visits OÂ’BrienÂ’s home after the war, he asks OÂ’Brien to portray him as a heroic leader. He hopes to find deliverance in OÂ’BrienÂ’s writing. Norman Bowker, on the other hand, never finds a release from the painful memories of the war. When he returns home heÂ’s unable to break free from the gravitational pull of the war, a metaphor beautifully captured in the image of driving endlessly in circles around the lake. Unable to move forwards into a new life or return to the war, he eventually commits suicide.

POINT OF VIEW

The novel makes strategic shifts back and forth between first and third person. The first chapter is entirely third person, laying the groundwork for the themes of the book with generalizations and insights. By the second chapter OÂ’Brien shifts to first person, inserting a version of himself as a character, as he discusses the war with his former commanding officer. He continues to fluctuate back and forth between the two voices throughout the novel, producing an interesting effect. A new theme often begins with a few pages of musings and memories, written in third person, which is immediately followed by a first-person story that provides examples of the same theme. Thus, we have a fluid transition from general to specific.

Within the first person narrative there are also major transitions in time. Most stories involve OÂ’Brien as a young soldier, told in real time as if heÂ’s back in Vietnam. He describes the sights, sounds, and his emotion as if heÂ’s still in his early twenties. Later in the chapter, however, he will jump ahead twenty years and share his feelings and impressions of the same incident. The Man I Killed is the best example of this time warp.

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