As I said at the end of class, I thought both sides did a good job of isolating what seems to be the key question of Neilson's article: Does The Things They Carried offer a moral critique of/comment on war in general and the Vietnam War in particular? Or does postmodernism somehow make it impossible to take a moral stance?
Please address this question here for your "closing arguments." There is no limit to how many people from each side can post, and you can feel free to comment upon each other's posts.
Although postmodernism can be perceived as a form of writing that disables the writer from taking a stance on certain subject, especially war, in reality postmodernism allows the writer to describe in detail what other traditional forms of writing cannot handle. Tim O'Brien uses postmodernism in "The Things They Carried" for the purpose of conveying what textbooks and non-fiction books cannot- the actual feeling of one who experienced the Vietnam war first hand. O'Brien is often criticized for his use of postmodernism to write a book on war. Some believe that, because postmodernists don't believe in any truths, it would be impossible for them to accurately describe the Vietnam war. These same people say that O'Brien purposely tries to confuse us with broken story lines and unclear happenings for no reason- they believe that this is actually harmful to our understanding of the war. The fault in this argument is that O'Brien knew that textbooks could give one all of the hard facts that they could want, but that is not 100% of what happened in the Vietnam war. An exact number of how many Vietnamese died in the war does not have the same effect on a person than hearing a personal story of a soldier that killed one Vietnamese man. O'Brien wanted to show the moral confusion during the time of the Vietnam war, and the postmodernist style was the perfect way to convey to many those feelings and experiences in a way that simple facts cannot.
ReplyDeletePostmodern style makes us question whether or not these events that happen in the book are true. O’Brien’s whole idea is to confuse us whether or not these events our true. He is playing games with the truth throughout the whole book, dancing between the line of real and fantasy. He tries to play it off as a work of nonfiction by placing the quote in the beginning of the book and then tells us throughout the novel that he is writing a “true war story”. His game that he plays throughout the novel just adds to the confusion surrounding the war. O’Brien is a lost soul back from the war and this book is an attempt to interpret his feelings rather than talk about the war. His trauma is writing off history and the actual events that occurred. His interpretations condone the immoral events that the soldiers did in Vietnam because the postmodern style disables moral criticism. Postmodernism emphasizes that there is no real certain truth but this is not the case for the Vietnam War. O’Briens postmodern, ethnocentric, solipsistic view of the Vietnam war undermines the true events and prevents the reader from accepting the certain truth that exists.
ReplyDeleteI think that O'Brien rightfully chose to write this novel in a postmodern style because it's the only way that can portray the moral confusion that was the war, specifically the Vietnam War. Nobody really knew why they were fighting or what they were fighting for; men were drafted and told to kill in order to protect their men. O'Brien uses postmodernism to show the readers that while postmodernism can write off morals and completely desensitize the readers to the potential morale of the story, this fact is what makes this specific writing style perfect for "The Things They Carried". Postmodernism doesn't keep the reader from knowing the "right" or "wrong" of the situation at hand, it helps the reader understand that the people involved in the stories didn't have such a certainty about the said rights and wrongs of the world because of their extremely fragile mental states. It's not to say that postmodernism can't sway the morality of a story, but it definitely doesn't do that in this novel; it just adds to the already emotionally troubling situation at hand (Vietnam War, specifically), giving us as readers the intimate side of the war that we don't get just by hearing hard facts from a textbook.
ReplyDeleteFirst, I don't think O'Brien's whole idea was to play off the novel as non-fiction. In the beginning of the book he states that the novel is "a work of fiction." In my opinion, he says this because the book was all about his experience in Vietnam, and there really is no way for anyone to 100% believe in your experience, because it was YOURS. Think about it, trying to put yourself in someone else's body and mind is completely impossible. You guys seemed to be angry at him for not telling us every single fact about the Vietnam War, so as to put the United States and Vietnam at peace. He obviously didn't want to take on such a huge responsibility as to tell us every single fact about every single event that involved every single person and everyone's individual perspective about the War and what happened, because it's impossible. All he could do was portray his personal experience to us, in the way that he remembered it...so who are we to say it's just a game or that it's not true? We have no way of knowing! He framed it using post-modernism because it was the only way to portray the moral confusion that was the war, as Serayah said, and his own moral confusion especially.
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