The Things They Carried: Narrator Critique - Research Paper Example

A Critical Analysis of the Narrator-protagonist as the Dubious but Honest Guide for the Readers to the Battleground of the Vietnam War Tim O’ Brien’s novel, “The Things They Carried” can be marked up as the secretion of the psychological burdens of a psychologically traumatized person. Tim’s narrative technique often induces the readers to grapple for meanings kept hidden and lurking in the characters’ traumatized psychology. The protagonist narrator, Tim O’Brien, as an ex-soldier of the Vietnam War narrates his stories from a collective protagonist’s first person point of view, though the first tree stories are completely told in third person. Yet the same ambiguous and remorseful tone of the narrator protagonist is evident in all these first three stories. The ambiguity of Tim’s dubious first person narration along with epistemological uncertainties, induced by Tim, in the readers’ mind rather force them to rely more and more on the narrator as a guide through the atrocities and cruelties of war as per what to go and view the massacre and where not to. Therefore Tim as a narrator exploits the readers’ psychological angst by being dubious to the readers just to warn them how storytelling can cheat their eyes (Bluck 73; Conway 34).. Referring to this epistemological uncertainty, created by the author in the readers’ psyche that the stories render Catherine Callaway comments as following: “The epistemological ambivalence of the stories in the Things They Carried is reinforced the book’s ambiguity of style and structure” (250) The narrator Tim himself along with his assumed ambiguity renders the narrative an apparently believable continuity between the episodes of the novel, and hereby, sustains a more psychological and emotional progress about the war. That is, the narrator relates more of a spiritual journey than a military one. The surface level expectation, of the readers, that the novel tells the story of a war, is fulfilled through Tim’s effort to let the readers feel the immediate experience of war standing close to the battleground. Yet the war progresses little through these episodes. Rather the tantalizing meaning of the war continually gets developed through the elegiac continuity which exists among the episodes. The narrator, Tim’s psyche sits at the center of this continuity as a medium that links between the episodes. His role is more of a spiritual and psycholigcal agent who symbolizes the progress, not of the war, but the war’s meaning or reality (Chen 2). In this regard, Frank Hassebrock and Brenda Boyle comment: Psychological research has shown that autobiographical memories represent knowledge of our self in the past, but we also use this self-knowledge to guide our behaviors in the present and even our projected future self. Therefore, the self (or "psyche") that is revealed in the narrator's stories in The Things They Carried can be examined with respect to the psychological functions of memory that we have been considering in the course. (3) Though the episodes of the narrative are not chronologically sequenced and not exclusively military-progress specific, an intangible progress prevails throughout these episodes. Being threatened and subsequently being provoked by the ambiguity and dubiousness of Tim’s narrative techniques the readers’ attempts to muster the meaning from these episodic pictures necessarily gives birth to this meaning that war is not something conventionally assumed by the most. The stories told in twenty-two chapters of the novel “range from several lines to many pages and demonstrate well the impossibilities of knowing the realities of war” (Callaway 251). Sometimes the stories abruptly stop only “to be continued pages or chapters later” (Callaway 252). Often some stories are told by several characters part by part or randomly. Yet the validity of some stories can be questioned from the very beginning though they are told as if they are true. Referring to the possible motif behind this random fashion of storytelling Callaway comments: O’Brien draws the reader into the text, calling the reader’s attention to the process of invention and challenging him to determine which, if any, of the stories are true. As a result, the stories become epistemological tools, multidimensional windows through which the war, the world, and the way of telling a war story can be viewed from many different angles and visions. (Callaway 253) The episodes narrated by Tim serve as a set of catalysts that raise the epistemological uncertainties about the conventional perception of war. Tim recounts his experiences about the war and oft-repeatedly comments on them. He tells the story of the war when it is already over. This retrospective narration necessarily allows him to comment while recounting his experiences. The readers can view Tim’s psychological development from a traditional rationalist to a grief-stricken personality who tells stories of the war in order to deal with his confusion over the atrocities. Indeed the same psychological developments of the other characters who survive till the end of the war are more or less the same as Tim’s. Though the stories of the novel are told separately in different episodes, the most part of the narration appears to be essentially locked within the narrator’s psyche. This episodic narration along with its confessional style contributes to the conversion of the Vietnam War into a more abstract one that is universally familiar to human experience. Essentially Tim’s experiences of fighting in Vietnam War puts forward the fact that the psychological burden of war is more powerful than the sense of duty that a soldier should show in war. More or less all of the soldiers in the Alpha Team are connected with their past through the things they carry with them. Lieutenant Cross is found to be regretful for Ted Lavender’s death even twenty years after the war. He confides in O’ Brian that he will never forgive himself for Lavender’s death. While he has to bear emotional attachments of civil life during the war, he bears the burdens of his experiences in war after it. Again Norman Bowker’s grief is so powerful that he has to go through unremitting struggle with the emptiness of life. Even Ted Lavender, another soldier of Alpha Team, has to use hallucinogens like marijuana to repel the anxiety and fear of war. O’ Brian narrates the reality of war in the following manner, “I’d come to this war a quiet, thoughtful sort of person, a college grad…but after seven months in the bush I realized that those high, civilized trappings had somehow been crushed under the weight of the simple daily realities. I’d turned mean inside.” (O’Brian 122) Tim narrates the stories of the war from a confessional psychology. He exploits this mode to produce a new meaning of the war. Indeed the epistemological uncertainties about the war grow from this very point. In the first story, the items that the soldiers of the Alpha Team carried juxtapose the realities of war to the reality of civil and homely life. The mingling of the military things with homely personal objects does not permit the heroism of ‘war’ to remain intact. Rather war becomes an emotional issue, a recollection of the past, a destructor that destroys memories, passion, dreams, and stories as well. The episodes of the novel rather repel the idealism that surrounds the conventional notion of war. They bring it down to life and earth to realism striping it off the sky-high idealist look. This very epistemological confusion, about the war, which has been puffed in the episodes of the novel, forces the readers to conjure up a new image of war. In the novel, Tim O Brian explores into the psychology of the soldiers of the Alpha Team. He has tried to prove that the motivations of war among those who are in war are totally different from the expectation of those who are outside of the war. Commoners naturally think that the psychological motivation of war is to fight for the country’s cause. But the narrator’s experience shows that the soldiers’ motivation to involve in the war is not totally based on the motivation to fight for the country’s cause. This moral quandary of the soldiers of the Alpha Team rather casts a shadow on the acceptability of war. The soldiers go to war in order to avoid being shamed by the people in the society. The narrator describes it in the following manner: “They carried the soldier’s greatest fear, which was the fear of blushing. Men killed, and died, because they were embarrassed not to…… just to avoid the blush of dishonor.” (O’ Brian 59) The narrator feels that this fear triumphs over his morality that the war is not just. In the chapter, “On the Rainy River”, he describes his reaction after getting the draft notice to go the war. He says that he is not willing to join the war because he feels that it is not just. Yet he comes to a decision to join the war because he does not want to be marked as a coward. Here the readers are aware of the fact that he is forced to join the war by his fear to be jeered as a coward. He is not motivated by the traditional stimulus to fight for the country’s cause. Indeed the novel’s episodic structure greatly assists the author’s to develop a collective protagonist. Like the protagonist-narrator Tim, other characters also tell their stories just to contribute to the development of the meaning that the novel as a whole conveys. The novel appears to be Tim’s narration about the Alpha Team’s presence in the war. But Tim’s periodic oscillation between the present and the past and his movement between his town in America and the battlefield in Vietnam rather allow the collective protagonist of the novel to play in a major historical context. Thus the whole novel produces a different truth about war and at the same time, the truth about the Americans’ involvement in the Vietnam War in particular. The greater meaning of the war continues to develop throughout the psychological development of the characters. Works Cited Bluck, Susan. “Autobiographical memory: Exploring its functions in everyday life.” Memory, 11(2003):113-123. Callaway, Catherine. "'How To Tell A True War Story': Metafiction In The Things They Carried." Critique 36.4 (1995): 249. Academic Search Complete. Web. 12 Apr. 2012.   Chen, Tina. “Unraveling the Deeper Meaning: Exile and the Embodied Poetics of Displacement in Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 39, No. 1. (Spring), 1998 pp. 77-98. Conway, Martin. “Memory and self.” Journal of Memory and Language, 53, 594-628. 2005 Hassebrock, Frank, & Boyle, Brenda. “Memory and narrative: Reading The Things They Carried for psyche and persona”. Across the Disciplines, 6. April 3, 2009. October 14, 2012. Available at http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/hassebrock_boyle2009.cfm O’ Brian, Tim. The Things They Carried. Sydney: Grove Publications, 2001 Read More