Speaking of Courage
In the last chapter we read, Tim O'Brien tells a story of Norman Bowker. However, at the end of the chapter he writes: "He did not freeze up or lose the Silver Star for valor. That part of the story is my own." Do you think that O'Brien wrote a story about Bowker using his real name or he just made it up and actually the character of Bowker was Tim O'Brien? Explain
When I first read it I took it as O'Brien having made up the all story, I don't really know why, it just felt like that. However when I read it the second time I had a different impression: it could be that O'Brien was in that situation, not Norman Brower. Throughout the novel we have seen how people sometimes have difficulties telling stories about their past that recollect death, trauma, or cowardice and O'Brian could have chosen this way of telling its story so that it was easier for him to remember that bad episode and by using the other soldier name he would have been less exposed to the memories and the feelings that that episode causes.
ReplyDeleteI think this is something hard to explain because the end of O'Brien's "Notes" was so abrupt that nobody saw it coming. However, based on our experience of O'Brien, he did have some tendency to manipulate the readers. For example, he made up the story of the dead Vietnamese "Scholar". Was he actually a scholar? or maybe he was a vietcong who was trying to kill American soldier? From chapter "Good Form", we learned that the dead citizen might not necessarily be a scholar. He might very well just be a Vietcong. So I think we can bet on O'Brien, for the past record, that he made up the whole story of Norman Bowker, or even Norman Bowker the character.
ReplyDeleteI think that O'Brian made up the both Bowker's name and his story in order to explain an experience or emotion that he had during the war that would help the reader understand what war was like. O'Brian seems to be doing this in a lot of his chapters, saying how something is true but then later telling us that it isn't. So what I think is that O'Brian is making up names and stories in order to tell the reader different experiences that he had during the war and what he was feeling.
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