Thursday, October 22, 2015

Exploration 6: The Things They Carried

     The story in the book "The Things They Carried" that is my favorite is "The Dentist" because it demonstrates a central theme that always arises in my head all the time, and that is proving a point to others or even to ones self and the extremity one will go to do that.
     The story is about Curt Lemon, where the men were in the South China Sea when an army dentist is sent over to check all of the soldiers teeth. Curt Lemon as a kid had multiple bad experiences and that led to his tensing as he sat in the chair waiting for his teeth looked at because since being a high schooler, he had never let anyone mess with his teeth. Curt Lemon finally admitted this and when he was finally called into the dentists office to have his teeth fixed, he fainted before the dentist even layed a finger on him. Curt Lemon was embarrassed by this so late that night he creeps into the tent and asks the doctor to pull out his "messed up tooth", the dentist finds nothing wrong with it but since he heavily insists he pull it out, he yanked it.
     The character I find the most correlating is Rat Kiley because I find a legitimate interest in him to help people despite the given circumstance and his perception of the world. When Rat Kiley tells stories he wants to ensure that the people listening are digesting what he is saying just as much as I want to when I am telling a story. I just see myself and Rat Kiley as people who are complex thinkers that derive our central brainstorming and intricate perceptions of the world in which we rationalize certain things the same and that we care a lot about people.
     The best convention of narrative in my opinion is the quote from Page 31 in O'Brien's book, "On occasion the war was like a Ping-Pong ball, you could put a fancy spin on it and make it dance." This quote was so absolutely mind boggling for me and it set in in a way that no other quote did. I found it absolutely incredible that Natalee used the same quote because I think this gives a great detail of what the Vietnam war was like. This war hits home with so many people due to the draft and so many different takes and experiences were derived from.
     The part that stuck out to me kind of sums of the book, when O'Brien talks about in Spin about Literature and his writing of war stories. He said, "I feel guilty sometimes... Fourty-Three years old and Im still writing war stories. My daughter Kathleen says its an obsession.....As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come. That's the real obsession. All those stories." This is so flamboyantly deep because his daughter thinks he is obsessed with war stories, but he is obsessed with stories. He loves telling stories and writing them because he is a writer. He has a passion for telling stories based on memories.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.