Analysis Of Metafiction By O Brien

In telling the story of a sweetheart in the throngs of war, O’Brien knew his audience would need a space where the possibility of this event could have existed. Metafiction allows him to use extensive exaggeration to stress the intensity of Mary Anne’s absorption into violence. This narrative would not have been possible within the constraints of traditional forms of fictions, and O’Brien needed to “swirl back and forth across the border between trivia and bedlam, the mad and the mundane” (O’Brien 64). In this setting that O’Brien created, “a young woman can consecutively defy social distinctions by defying gender distinctions, the distinction between human and animal, the distinction between animate and inanimate nature, and the distinction

Rat Kiley is a soldier who “when [the soldiers] listened to one of his stories, [they found themselves] performing rapid calculations in [their] head[s], subtracting superlatives, figuring the square root of an absolute and then multiplying by maybe (O’Brien 64).” At some point during the narration, the story is interrupted with, a complaint for a conventional ending, saying it’s “against the rules.. against human nature.” O’Brien, most probably, could not write a tangible ending for the readers and, therefore, it must be left to speculation. The “lack of closure is more acceptable in a mythic universe, where time does not conform to linear progression, than in one defined by the ontological rules of realist fiction” (Hantke). The listener must be reassured that the rules are not broken. But in this story, all the rules are broken. They are fragmented pieces of what society dictates they should have been. Rat explores if he had told the story about a man in saying “I mean, if it was a guy, everybody’d say, Hey, no big deal, he got caught up in the nam shit… You got these blinders on about women. How gentle and peaceful they are… Pure garbage. You got to get rid of that sexist attitudes” (O’Brien 76). Rat juxtaposes his own sexist language with wanting the men to lose their “sexist attitudes.” Rat’s personal

This absence of female war perspectives stems from the cultural principles of war that dictated that women, especially American sweethearts, should have no part in the gruesomeness of war at Vietnam. Women aren’t a part of the story of Vietnam for the same reasons men must be the ones to tell that narrative; Men went to Vietnam, while women stayed in their sphere of domesticity. The incommunicability of war creates a narrative in which “knowledge is attained experientially and thus they exclude women from understanding the war experience” (Farrell). “The Sweetheart of Song Tra Bong is particularly studied because “the absolute incongruity of having a woman enter the male sanctuary of war reinforced the extent to which culture constructs war as an all-male activity (Smith).” However, Mary Anne’s necklace of tongues violently testifies to her earned right to tell war stories. O’Brien integrates what the average person knows about the archetypal, male-centered war story into “the story of a young girl on a whimsical visit [which] opens [typical war stories] to fresh interpretation” (Wesley). In an interview, O’Brien clarifies for his readers that the purpose of Mary Anne Bell was to explain that “what happened to her ... was what happened to all of them.. her circumscribed feminine role as the archetypal American girl-next-door has not allowed her any previous access to the feeling